GVA senior director Mark Rawstron has taken aim at the property industry’s bland, homogenised business culture. Has a kind of London sameness seeped into the regions, or are they still a tasty place to do business? David Thame reports
Do you like vanilla? You had better, because these days the UK’s regional property business culture offers few alternatives – that is the claim by one long-serving regional head.
The ‘blandification’ of regional agency is the target of a parting shot from Mark Rawstron, regional senior director and head of GVA in Manchester.
Rawstron retires at the end of this month after 30 years with the firm and he has London’s pervasive influence on the agency scene in his crosshairs. He claims that a mighty tide of magnolia blandness is coming out of the capital and smothering the once-distinct business cultures of the regional cities, and that Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool have become homogenised.
Simultaneously, the strongly flavoured personalities that dominated the big regional cities in the 1990s have been replaced by a single vanilla menu choice of a kind that London likes.
Rawstron says: “The blanding effect has been going on in the big London agency offices for years, and the regions have followed as firms expanded out of London. We are lucky GVA is a regional firm that expanded into London, not the other way around.”
London’s antiseptic business culture might have been resisted if the regions had kept up their old highly sociable ways. But Rawstron says they have given up. “Public sector clients won’t have a biscuit with their coffee because they have become so averse to accepting hospitality.”
He advises younger colleagues to fight back. “Put down your devices and go and see people. And don’t be afraid to have an opinion because without showing that capacity, you can’t give anyone good advice,” he says.
It’s a last-ditch call to resist London blandness. But is anyone listening? Is this just the angry voice of Lancastrian middle age?
No, says Tim Davies, head of the Bristol office at Colliers International. He thinks Rawstron’s got a point.
“Regional offices are more cloned than they used to be,” he says. “All the regional offices in a firm mix more than they did 20 years ago – so we become more similar. There’s perhaps still a distinctly northern way of doing business, but really the only big difference is between London and the regions, all of them.”
Davies says the showmen of yesteryear are thin on the ground. ”I’m trying to recruit one – the kind of big personalities that carried the market 20 years ago are hard to find. Those larger-than-life guys brought business in. If I could find one, I’d employ them.”
However, turn to 37-year-old Eamon Fox, head of office agency at Knight Frank in Leeds, and you get a different generation’s perspective. For Fox, there’s space enough for personality – and branding is not a dirty word.
“As firms get bigger, they get more similar– and I’m not slagging people off here – you get a drone mentality. It’s all corporate etiquette and protocol. In the end clients find it hard to differentiate one firm from another.
“But there are some more entrepreneurial property consultancies that give people space to spread their wings and develop personality,” he says.
The issue for Fox is: just not too much personality. “When I first started, I watched what people did pitching for clients and thought I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t cut out for this – but clients don’t want showmanship any more. They want a professional service, analysis, understanding their needs.
“The truth is that the group of clients that wants showmen is now smaller than the group that wants geeks,” says Fox, who is happy to call himself a bit geeky.
“Yes, I think about the Knight Frank brand,” he says. “But I also think about the Eamon Fox brand.”
Tim Garratt, managing director at Innes England, concedes that the procurement process and its box-ticking pre-qualification questionnaires encourage blandness. He agrees with Rawstron that London business culture has, “had the personality sucked out of it”. But have the regions become bland?
“No, we still have those big personalities,” he says.
Ashley Hancox, the Birmingham-based head of CBRE’s national office agency group, says personality and corporate brand are equally important.
“Without the personalities and their passions, you can’t deliver on the corporate branding,” he says.
“I understand the complaint that regional agency has got bland, but I don’t agree. It’s more exciting than it has ever been because it’s all about larger, more complicated deals.
“A well-developed corporate brand helps immensely with clients and recruiting,” he says. “There are still mavericks, of course, and you can still have fun with colleagues and clients, but it’s about adhering to appropriate standards of behaviour.”
Like Fox, Hancox suggests the era of data-crunching makes showmanship irrelevant. “In the old days, opinion counted – but now we have facts.”
Procurement
Head office procurement processes – many driven from London – have also had a hand in blandification, Rawstron argues. “Twenty years ago, the client had more discretion on who to use, but now we’re often dealing with procurement teams who buy toilet paper and paperclips along with property consultancy.
“Procurement is all about process, not personality; about driving down costs, but not value for money. And nobody buying services risks being shouted at if they hire a big brand, so everyone plays safe.”
