Legal & General have decided to sell their property management and development expertise to the outside world.
The insurance company have £2.5bn worth of property in their various portfolios and a staff of 250 deployed on the property operations.
In a move to pull more profits out of the property division they are launching Legal & General Property, which will be a subsidiary of the parent company, Legal & General Group.
The new company will be selling their services in property investment, development, financing, marketing, and management. “We’re going for work which other people in the industry traditionally have gone for,” said the company’s managing director, Peter Sim. “If British Rail wants property managed, we would put our name forward alongside Richard Ellis.”
“Our main thrust,” he noted, “will be to seek to manage other people’s portfolios more than we do now.” Not only is the new business a way of increasing L&G’s income, it is also a way of countering the movement of estate agents into the financial services game, according to Mr Sim. The new services are being promoted in a brochure that will be sent to surveyors, architects, pension fund clients, agents and others involved in property investment operations.
Mr Sim said it was too early to tell how much business the new company might be able to bring in from the outside. The creation of Legal & General Property is part of a major restructuring of the parent company into six separately accountable business units.
L&G are the subject of this week’s “Fund Profile” on p13.
