Over the fence
Published: 23 September, 2010
Anne Rush, Capital & Regional’s national property manager, is making the leap from the client side to consultancy as she joins Cushman & Wakefield as a partner in its expanding retail asset management team
Rush says the move is the culmination of a 35-year career in shopping centre asset management that has taken her from Royal Insurance to PruPIM to The Mall. And she isn’t daunted by the prospect of a change in culture. “The commonality is I’ve always been advising,” she says.
She first dipped a toe into the world of property as assistant to Jonathan Strong, who was chief investment surveyor at Royal Insurance at a time when the fund was growing a property portfolio for the first time. And it didn’t take her long to realise that property offered the chance of a varied and rewarding career so she began studying in the evenings for her ISVA exams.
Once qualified she moved to PruPIM and it was there that she first got to grips with shopping centres, a sector that has remained her speciality ever since. “I realised I much preferred the complexity of shopping centres, and an opportunity came along to join the Pru’s shopping centre team,” she remembers.
And Rush’s love of a complex challenge was put to the test when she ran the refurbishment and redevelopment of the 52-acre Cwmbran town centre in South Wales.
Unusually for the Prudential, which traditionally managed its portfolio in-house, the Scottish Amicable fund that Rush was working on used external agents, so she got her first taste of managing managing agents. These included John Prestwich who now heads the management operation at Cushman & Wakefield.
And then in 2004 Rush was recruited by Capital & Regional for its fast-expanding Mall portfolio. To begin with much of her time was spent conducting due diligence on new acquisitions, as the portfolio grew to 23 shopping centres. More recently, though, she has been preparing those same properties for sale as Capital & Regional slims down its portfolio.
“Buyers are very demanding nowadays,” she says. “They leave no stone unturned so you have to be prepared to explain every management decision you’ve made in great detail.”
And although it’s been something of a roller-coaster ride, Rush describes her time at Capital & Regional as “interesting and challenging.” She points out: “I was the only qualified property manager there, so it was very demanding.”
And in parallel with her management career, Rush has always shown a keen interest in training. She teaches the law module of the BCSC/College of Estate Management diploma in shopping centre management, as well as acting as an external examiner.
In her new role at Cushman & Wakefield she will be responsible for the strategic development of the asset management business. And one of her key clients will be Hermes, which has been doing some ground-breaking work around CSR and green issues on centres like Crystal Peaks in Sheffield. This will be another element of continuity, as at Capital & Regional she played a key role in the development of The Mall’s green policy.
So what changes has Anne Rush seen over the years, apart from the obvious technological advances? Again, it’s that word complexity. “It’s all got more complex,” she says, “especially in ownership structures. It’s got to the stage now where it’s unusual for a large centre to be in a single ownership.”
