For a company in the business of housing other firms, TLB Properties is remarkably bad at housing itself. Its nerve centre is a cold warehouse on the outskirts of Doncaster. The austere shell lacks plasterboard, heating or even a ceiling. Its only furniture is a red leather sofa.
This is despite holding thousands of acres of land scattered around the country, including business parks and edge-of-town developments, and harbouring an ambition to build a £500m London portfolio over the next five years.
The reason for the company’s spartan headquarters reveals a key to its success. Having bought Centrix Park, with development land to the rear, it had hoped to move into part of the 15,000 sq ft of offices on the site. Yet TLB’s founder and managing director, Nadeem Shah, could not say no when LA Fitness wanted to lease it.
Admittedly, the deal was a major coup. In December, TLB Properties announced it had enticed the group out of London to a headquarters in the North, bringing 120 jobs to the town.
The Shahs have made quite a name for themselves in Doncaster. Nadeem is a staunch Conservative, a straight-talking businessman with a gentle Yorkshire accent. He is also a tireless charity fundraiser, and was one of the first people on the ground helping survivors of the 2005 Pakistani earthquake.
His style contrasts with that of his son and director Tariq, a sharp-suited, strongly political figure, softly spoken with a cultured accent and a razor-sharp mind. Both are passionate about developing and fiercely loyal to their hometown.
“This town has shown us a lot of respect,” says Nadeem. “It is a Labour town and we are the total opposite, and yet they gave me the title of first business ambassador.”
This would have seemed unimaginable when Nadeem, aged 8, arrived in the UK from Pakistan. Catapulted into 1960s Britain, he cut an exotic figure. Smiling, he recalls how school friends, without malice, rubbed his skin and asked why he was “mucky”.
His family had hoped he would go to university but a teenage Nadeem had other ideas. Aged 17, he told his father that he planned to set up a business selling houses. Nadeem asked his father to lend him start-up money. “He looked me up and down, said ‘No. You’re too young, you don’t know the industry. You’re a bad risk.’”
Through a combination of a bank loan and wages from a factory job, Nadeem raised £800 and built up a portfolio of a dozen residential properties for rent. “It was the 1970s in Doncaster, and you got asked what a flat was. You took them round and they’d say: ‘Why didn’t you say it were haf a house?’.”
By 1984, Nadeem was building his own houses through his residential business, Swan Homes, as well as business parks. Then disaster struck. Just as the first sites were completed, the recession hit. “They were difficult times, people in the community were committing suicide and interest rates were 17%. I realised things were going to be this way for a while, so I sold the properties for enough to pay the banks off and moved on.”
The gamble paid off, and today the company has a thriving portfolio in Doncaster that includes the 40,000 sq ft Cavendish Court and 30-acre Riverdale business park. It hints that it also has an eye on Sheffield, but Nadeem says there are still opportunities to develop within the company’s hometown.
“There is a market for offices at £15.50 per sq ft and one for offices at £7 per sq ft, but you can’t just put up flash units on any land,” he says.
Tariq adds: “Doncaster has been holding on to its phantoms, and it is only in the past four or five years that it has started to change.”
Doncaster’s mayoral system has helped, believes Nadeem. “If the mayor does not produce what is promised, he will be blamed rather than a committee of people you can’t focus on.”
While Tariq and Nadeem advocate a hands-on approach for local government, they would like something quite different from central government. Here Nadeem hands over to Tariq, who ran as the Conservative candidate in Belby, Yorkshire, last month. He tells stories of colliding, literally, with Maggie Thatcher on his way out of a Tory party meeting and how Baroness Thatcher “liked his tie”.
The fondness vanishes from his voice when talking about the current government. Tariq wants it to stop “meddling” in the planning system, and would like to see decisions handled at a local level. “We need it to step back a bit. Its role is to be sensitive and supportive and guide us. We are all partners, and we don’t need a government stipulating and dictating like it has for the past 10 years.”
Tariq also has the ear of HRH the Prince of Wales via his involvement with the Prince’s Trust, and the young Muslims mentor programme. Through this, he has become well versed in the problems of “ghettoisation” and “disaffected youth”.
Here the pair believe that, as developers, they can help by creating communities, putting residential with offices and mixing big andsmall businesses.
At Centrix Business Park, Doncaster, they will be looking to practise what they preach. Says Nadeem: “We could have created every sq ft possible, but then we’d have a dead site.”
Yet the Shahs are not hopeless romantics. “We don’t want to look brilliant and lose money,” says Tariq. “There is nothing glamorous about bankruptcy.” Nadeem adds: “If you are letting smaller units you get a better rent per sq ft, but you don’t get a good covenant for 25-30 years. However, I think no one wants to sign up for that long any more. They are all looking at five-year leases and, over that time, it makes little difference if it is a plc or a one-man band.”
On a more philosophical note, Nadeem adds: “We also have moral duties. I want to sit back in 25 years and say I created that, I provided, I was responsible for those jobs.”
CVs
Nadeem Shah
Born 1956, Lahore, Pakistan
1963 Moves to UK
1973 Buys first pair of houses
1983 Founds Swan Homes
1999 Founds TLB properties
Lifestyle Wife, two sons and a daughter
Hobbies: Travelling, driving horses, shooting, motorbikes
Tariq Shah
Born September 1983, Doncaster
Educated St Peter’s School, York
2002 Gap year working on site and in acquisitions with his father
2006 Gains BSc Economics and Political Science from Birmingham University. Joins TLB properties and becomes acquisitions director
Hobbies: Horseriding, clay pigeon shooting, politics
Fundraising follows earthquake experience
Most people’s instinct on hearing about a natural disaster is to get as far away as possible. Nadeem’s was to jump on the first plane to Pakistan and help the survivors of the earthquake which devastated the country in October 2005. It was only when he arrived in one of the remote villages that the true horror of what had happened hit him.
“There were bodies everywhere, just lying in heaps like piles of leaves,” he says. “The dust made it look like it was raining talcum powder, the silence was eerie. I thought I was having a nightmare.”
Nadeem stayed, braving aftershocks and landslides to start organising lorries to take food, water and coffin cloth to the villages. “At one point, boulders started falling into the road we were travelling on. I’ve often wondered when my time was going to come, but that day I was 100% convinced I would die.”
Nadeem has pledged to build a cottage hospital for Noon Bangla. He has written a book about his experiences, and all proceeds will go towards this.
Working through the AHS foundation – a charity set up by Nadeem and his wife Maureen in memory of his late father – he is raising £250,000. The foundation is also involved with UK charities, including People United Against Crime and the Community Foundation.
Earthquake is for sale at www.ahsfoundation.com/news_book-launch.htm.
London beckons
Over the next five years, the Shahs intend to build a £500m portfolio in central London in £50m-£100m chunks. The company recently bought what Tariq describes as a “signature” building adjacent to Baker Street tube station, NW1, for a “seven-figure sum”. The block will be refurbished and held as a London base for the firm.
Nadeem dismisses talk of an investment peak, saying: “For any proposal, my first question is always: ‘Where is the margin?’”
The Shahs will be investing £120m of their own money, geared up to £500m. “The business must work,” says Nadeem. “I’ll go 60:40 with the gearing, but I won’t look at anything unless there is a 20% margin. I’m not into trophies.”
