The risk-taker
Published: 17 January, 2007
There's probably quite a few retail tenants who'd love to see their landlord marooned in a liferaft in a howling storm just off the coast of Antarctica. But only one has actually found himself in that situation. Steve Boultbee Brooks, managing director of the shopping centre specialist Boultbee and its management subsidiary EFM, is one of this country's leading polar explorers in his spare time.
In 2004 he was on the final leg of an epic 20,000-mile journey, trying to become the first person to fly a helicopter from the North to the South Pole, when mechanical failure forced his single-engine helicopter to ditch 400 miles south of Cape Horn. With his co-pilot Quentin Smith he managed to get out of the machine before it sank and took to the liferaft. The two spent the next 18 hours bailing out the flimsy raft - the size of a child's paddling pool - and trying to ward off hypothermia while being battered by the mighty waves.
Eventually they were rescued by a Chilean icebreaker, and a year later they returned to complete the final leg, finally reaching the South Pole in January 2005.
This was not Boultbee Brooks' first brush with the rigours of polar exploration. In 2002 he became the first person to drive across the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia. After a string of unsuccessful attempts he finally succeeded in a specially-built vehicle resembling a Sno-Cat, but with Archimedes screws replacing the caterpillar tracks.
"I've always like pushing the edges," he says. "Exploring and expeditions is a way of doing that." So does he have any other trips in the pipeline? "I've got a young family at the moment, so no. But I haven't got it out of my system."
So for the time being his considerable energies are devoted to running a complex web of inter-related companies, trading in three different countries. But what unites them all is shopping centres. "Retail is something you can really get your hands on. We see our shopping centres as being at the heart of their communities, and that's a huge asset."
From humble beginnings as a small construction business 20 years ago, founded by Boultbee Brooks and his brother Clive, the company now owns a £1.5bn portfolio and manages assets worth over £2bn.
Boultbee Brooks is based in London, working from the Enterprise, a boat moored on the Thames at Cadogan Pier in Chelsea. "But the engine room of the business is in Hereford, where Clive and the accounts team is based," he says. "My brother is the financial genius, and I concentrate on personnel management, information technology and providing vision for the future."
Until the late 1990s Boultbee Brooks was content to concentrate on the UK, and has grown an impressive portfolio, taking in schemes like Fleetwalk in Torquay, the Treaty Centre in Hounslow, The Maltings in St Albans, Marketgate in Lancaster, the Morecambe Arndale, Nicholson's Walk in Maidenhead and Longton Exchange.
But in recent years Scandinavia has become a new focus of activities. "We saw the margin between yield and interest rates in the UK getting a little too tight," Boultbee Brooks explains. Never one to be put off by cold weather, he happened on Sweden as a market with potential.
Now Boultbee owns nine centres there with 20-strong team based in Vasteras near Stockholm, and about 60 employees in all, including those based in the malls. Recently it has moved into the neighbouring Finnish market with two purchases. The first was Rovaniemi in Lapland and the second was Boultbee's biggest-ever purchase: the f350m Kamppi centre in Helsinki attracts 110,000 visitors per day. "That's just a bit more than Bluewater," Boultbee Brooks says.
While the overseas expansion has clearly been successful, Boultbee Brooks has taken pains to be sensitive to local ways of working. "You don't walk into someone else's party and start ordering them around," he says. "We go over as consultants. We take UK skills and knowledge and gently impart it."
So where next? Will the eastward expansion continue? "Russia worries us, but the Baltic states could be interesting," says Boultbee Brooks. "We're definitely looking at new markets and we'll do it the same way, by essentially becoming an indigenous business. At the moment Boultbee is more interested in Europe, but I wouldn't rule out more deals in the UK. At the moment, though, we're buying elsewhere because nobody here wants to sell."
In parallel with the investment business, a stable of service businesses has grown up under the European Fund Management (EFM) banner to look after the Boultbee portfolio and, increasingly, properties owned by third-party investors like Lehman Bros, Protego, CIT, ING Real Estate and Mutual Finance.
"The banks love it when we take over the management. There are lots of people out there raising money to buy property, but what the banks always ask is 'Where's your knowledge base?' The management side won't grow indefinitely. We're more interested in doing a great job and we won't grow the business just for the sake of it, although we do have the capacity to take on more at the moment.
"Our approach is very different," he continues. "Usually people tender management at the best price and the agent then manages the property at the cheapest price. Our first question is: 'What can we do to improve the property for both landlord and tenant?'
"When we buy a centre we usually inherit the manager - some have a facilities background while some are strong in marketing - but we bring all our resources to bear on it," he says. "It's important to talk to the tenants, find our what they want and need and then aggressively get on with it."
The stable of companies includes a facilities management business and an in-house security company. "We like our security staff to have their first name on their badge, so we've had to go through the whole licensing process," he says. "We spend a lot of time and money on training."
Another side of the operation is EFM Construction, one that Boultbee Brooks keeps a close eye on. "Having a construction capability in-house gives us flexibility," he says. "We have three permanent teams travelling round the country doing small jobs."
This capability comes in handy when it comes to refurbishment. "If you're doing it properly, refurbishment should be a continuous process," Boultbee Brooks insists. "We're always looking to improve light levels and flooring, adjusting the tenant mix to drive pedestrian flow and so on."
The subsidiary that allows Boultbee to keep close to the retail coalface is EFM Mall Trading, which operates RMUs in all the owned and managed centres. "Mall trading's very hands-on," he says. "It helps us learn about the nuts and bolts of retailing and it's becoming a significant value-adder.
"It's all about enhancing the centre, making it a pleasant place and creating the right ambiance and flow. Retailers are rightly suspicious of it because it's not been done well in the past," he admits, "but we use purpose-built RMUs that are beautifully presented, and we carefully manage the traders and police what they can and can't do. We have an ever-expanding database of traders, and we've learned by experience what works well."
As well as property investment, property management, construction and retail, an element of the business he takes obvious pleasure in is personnel management. "Our philosophy is to empower the people that work for us," he says. "We inherently trust people and if they make a mistake once it's OK.
"All too often nowadays that element of trust has gone. To make something work you have to trust people and take risks," he says. "Sadly, most people try to eliminate that."
