Lazarus Properties owns one in every five commercial buildings in Doncaster town centre and operates 90% of the town’s leisure market. But its directors do not like to shout about it. Ex-council builder Mick Murray and Lloyd Nicholson, who used to work as a nightclub doorman, avoid publicity like the plague. For example, unlike many in the world of property, Murray is happy to let third-in-command Glyn Smith take his place in front of EG‘s camera.
Instead, they have been quietly increasing their portfolio since they founded Lazarus in 1997 and now command a development and investment portfolio worth £60m.
Tracking Lazarus down in its home town reveals how unpretentious this Yorkshire operation is. The company is run by a handful of staff from a cabin attached to its Hallgate Street office building. Ever the businessmen, Murray and Nicholson prefer to let the rest of the building.
But things are changing. Lazarus is building itself a grade A office around the corner at Bradford Row, a development which was the fledgling company’s first purchase.
The company has some £12m of construction work under way at present, as far afield as the East Midlands. According to its property asset manager, Glyn Smith, there is around £30m in the pot ready to be invested. Smith also says that, via local investment partners and banks, it could potentially raise around £75m at short notice.
That Lazarus has reached this stage in such a short time is a result of Murray and Nicholson’s willingness to put local knowledge into action and take risks on buying up stock in which they see potential. It now has the regional big league in its sights.
Murray says his and Nicholson’s first foray into the commercial property market was met with bemusement: “Everyone thought we were insane when we bought Bradford Row,” he laughs. “But we saw the gap in the market and thought the commercial property in Doncaster was undervalued at the time and could provide good yields.”
Back then, Murray had just built his first house and his mate Nicholson suggested they take a risk of buying up and redeveloping Bradford Row, a 78,000 sq ft dilapidated row of shops in the town centre. Scrambling around the banks and by putting Murray’s home and Nicholson’s farm up as collateral, the two managed to pool just £400,000.
Luckily for them, the row’s Dutch owner, HV Netherland, desperate to offload its investment, was persuaded to loan them the rest of the £1.2m price tag. From this, the name Lazarus was coined. Murray and Nicholson, aware that they were trying to effectively raise Bradford Row from the dead, thought the biblical epithet apt.
Since then the business has snowballed thanks to the duo’s policy of holding onto properties and enjoying rental gains, which in turn fund further investment and development. For example, rents at Bradford Row have doubled from £6 per sq ft to £12 per sq ft since Murray and Nicholson bought it.
Further investment
The two have since bought and redeveloped Doncaster’s Priory Walk leisure and retail parade, and invested in land, offices, retail units, leisure and industrial stock under the name Lazarus and its various subsidiaries.
In operational terms, the company has expanded to include leisure management business Bar 24, as well as Urban i and Basilton Properties, the residential development side of the business, and investment management wing Pruron. Lazarus has its own planning consultant and, from September, in-house accountants and lawyers. This will bring Lazarus’s staff to 10, with more than 50 working for Bar 24.
The past decade has seen the company rise to become a strong player in the local property market, but it has yet to break into the regional big league and it does not have much of a foothold in the major Yorkshire markets of Leeds and Sheffield. However, its success has stemmed from seizing local opportunities.
Murray insists that concentrating on Doncaster is not solely about civic pride: “Everyone thinks it’s all flat cap and whippets here but it’s not, the town is moving forward.”
To a degree, it is. Already strong transport links have been supplemented by the opening of Robin Hood Airport in April, and the town’s status has been increased by the foundation of a university centre.
Although Murray admits that the town is a far cry from the regional benchmark set by Leeds, he insists it is a viable market.
To increase its profile though, Murray is keen to see the newly re-elected mayor Martin Winter campaign successfully for city status: “There is not yet a city mentality; we need to push for city status.”
In addition to its local patch, Lazarus has been building up its investment and development portfolio across Yorkshire and the East Midlands. Asked where he sees the company in five years’ time, Glyn Smith isn’t pulling his punches: “We will be up there with the big players.”
To get into the regional big league, Lazarus will have to deliver a headline-grabbing scheme, but Smith will only hint at the possibilities: “A good office complex in Doncaster would be an idea, and there are no hotels in the town at the moment.”
Lazarus has got a lot of work ahead of it to rival the likes of Yorkshire big hitters such as Evans Property Holdings – its assets were worth nearly £230m in 2004 – but with funds at its disposal, Lazarus is certainly a local player worth watching.
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As Glyn Smith, property asset manager with Lazarus Properties, conducts a short tour around Doncaster, it’s apparent how much the developer/investor has been buying up in the past eight years. Since founders Mick Murray and Lloyd Nicholson’s first purchase in 1996 of Bradford Row, then an unloved row of shops (see main feature), Lazarus has bought and spruced up town centre retail and leisure parade Priory Walk. It has also refurbished parts of the late 1990s scheme as well as pieces of extra development on the site it bought in 2002. A major chunk of Lazarus’ £60m portfolio is 275,000 sq ft of leisure space within Doncaster, a large proportion of which is operated through its subsidiary company Bar 24. This represents 90% of the town’s leisure market. Lazarus has branched out into the office and industrial markets, with around 75,000 sq ft of offices in its portfolio and 500,000 sq ft of industrial stock. The largest project in the pipeline is in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, on a 150-acre tract of land at Steetley Works purchased in stages since 2000. Lazarus is masterplanning a mixed-use scheme including industrial, office and residential space. The company is also developing up to 90 flats in Doncaster and is planning 148 in Halifax. It has approximately 120,000 sq ft of residential schemes under construction, with 30,000 sq ft going through the planning stages. As its portfolio expands, Lazarus seems to be attempting more ambitious schemes in a widening area. |
