William Beardmore-Gray knows how easy it is to be cynical about purpose in a company. But nine months into his tenure as senior partner and global chairman of Knight Frank, he is talking about it more than at any other point in his 30-plus years with the agency.
Beardmore-Gray wants his colleagues to do the same. His hope is that when a younger member of the team says in the pub or over dinner that they work for Knight Frank and their drinking or dining companion says “Oh, the estate agents?”, they respond by explaining just how much more they do.
“I want them to go, ‘Yeah, we are estate agents but our purpose is that we work in partnership to enhance people’s lives and environments’,” says Beardmore-Gray in his first big interview since taking his latest role.
Would that invite a snigger over a pint? Perhaps. But Beardmore-Gray is serious, and he says his team has the schemes to back up the rhetoric.
“What does that mean? What it means is that we played a small but important part in the regeneration of Battersea Power Station, which is going to change thousands of people’s lives on the South Bank, whether you are working there, living there, eating there,” he says. “It means we act for Indian Railways in trying to provide a much better environment for the 23 million people a day who travel on those railways, including at Bangalore train station, which we now manage.”
And it means working in a business that does more than make places, he adds. “We are changing people’s lives,” he says. “We are not just brokers, we are not just valuers. We are working as teams with people to change some of the most important districts in the world.”
Beardmore-Gray’s passion on this topic will surprise few of his industry acquaintances – certainly not the dealmakers and developers who worked with him during his years running the firm’s London offices business. But now he wants to be sure the next generation of Knight Frankers feel the same way.
Showing the way
For Beardmore-Gray, welcoming the latest cohort of graduates to Knight Frank last year was a milestone in his ability to help fire up that next generation. Outlining the firm’s strategy and vision to around 80 eager young professionals made him reflect on how different his own introduction to the company was back in the early 1990s.
“Nobody ever stood in front of me when I started my career 30 years ago and explained what we do like that,” he says. “You became a capital markets broker or you became an estate agent. When I talk about expansion, I’m not talking about necessarily getting bigger or scale. I’m talking about expansion of the opportunity for young people to come into our business and do things which were never available.”
Of last year’s graduate intake, 60% came without a real estate degree. Beardmore-Gray is proud of that.
“What we want to show to the world is that anyone who is bright and inquisitive has a place within our business,” he says. “On one level, what we do is not incredibly difficult. But it’s incredibly diverse and provides fantastic opportunities not just in the UK but around the world.
“We should be talking to anybody who thinks that they might want to be a lawyer or an accountant or go into tech. That is what is going to build and grow our industry, and also enable us to change the face of the top slice of our industry, which – hands up – is not diverse enough. It is not inclusive enough.”
Beardmore-Gray knows his own rise to the top of the firm will fuel any perception of a lack of diversity. Changes in the equity partnership will happen more slowly than changes in other areas of the firm, he says, but the goal is to ensure “that person who comes from an ethnic minority, that young female, somebody who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, who sits at the age of 21, 22, 23 in that room as a graduate, looks at our business and goes, ‘I can see a way to the top’”.
Right to Beardmore-Gray’s own seat. Eventually. “Look, I would love one of the next two senior partners of this business not to be white and male,” he says. “And I think we have every opportunity of achieving that. Whether it will be my successor in four years’ time, that is difficult to say. That is a reflection of the structure of our business and the time it is going to take to make meaningful change within the equity partnership. But we are absolutely laser-focused on putting the building blocks in place today.”
Slide rule
Over the past nine months, Beardmore-Gray has travelled to see colleagues in locations as varied as the US, Dubai, Australia, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and India. The Covid-19 pandemic kept global colleagues apart physically for a long time, he says, but in other ways brought them closer together.
“Throughout that Covid period, we have been drawn closer,” he says. “The requirement to communicate and collaborate in a time of adversity was really heartening to see. I always say about our businesses – we are big enough to have a global network and small enough to make it work. I believe that there is a difference between us and some of our competition, who are driven by very different ambitions.”
The difference between other publicly listed agencies and Knight Frank, with its partnership model, is front of mind for Beardmore-Gray – including when our discussion moves to the thorny issue of cost-cutting in a tougher economic climate. After two consecutive record years, the firm’s performance in its current financial year “is looking solid rather than spectacular”, he says, and the team is “putting a slide rule across all of our expenditure”. Some agencies are making redundancies. Will Knight Frank?
“We are really focused on keeping our teams together, protecting our people,” Beardmore-Gray says. “We don’t have shareholders or analysts looking for us to react in a certain way and driving some of our decision-makers. We will make our decisions based on what we think is right for the long term of the business. We are an organisation which is not necessarily focused on income or revenue; it is focused on profit. But if we have to take a lesser profit for a period of time because we see that, actually, that will position us better for quarter four of this year or quarter one of next year where we think the markets might return quite quickly, then that is what we will do.”
Beardmore-Gray has started the year with relative optimism. Opening a new calendar doesn’t do away with all of the problems of the year just past, of course. But the outlook already feels different to the depths of 2022, he says.
“In October and November, it really felt very dark, if I look at it from a UK perspective,” he says. “We had a government that had ripped up the rulebook on financial prudence and we were being looked in on by the rest of the world as, to be fair, a bit of a basket case. It feels very different now than perhaps it did in October and November.”
That’s the good news, but don’t get overexcited. “Volumes are going to reduce without a doubt,” Beardmore-Gray continues. “The challenges which were there in the last quarter of 2022 in relation to high inflation and the resultant rise in interest rates have a way to play through, and we are definitely seeing the effects of that on willing investors in our sector. There’s a certain amount of people who are quite understandably sitting back to see how things work their way through the system.”
Are you experienced?
Beardmore-Gray has survived enough downturns to keep a level head. We revisit an earlier conversation about learning from crises, and I mention a post on an online forum for young finance workers in which a member said real estate professionals should look for “cycle-tested” mentors aged 50 and over. Beardmore-Gray agrees – but adds that clients need that voice of experience as much as colleagues.
“Those people in the business who are my age, say, 45 to 55, have seen a lot of downturn, seen a lot of change,” he says. “We have seen many crises, and most of the clients we are dealing with won’t have. Those under 35 won’t have. So this is when our clients need us more than ever. They need us to be sitting with them, shoulder to shoulder and providing that experience. And this is where we need to be spending time with our people, guiding them how best to work with clients and help those clients perform well in their markets and organisations.”
What malaise he sees in sections of the market now “doesn’t feel systemic”, he adds. “This doesn’t feel like 2008-9, where the leverage position of both individuals and banks was very different to where we are today. Normally when one goes into a downturn, if that is what we are about to experience, you have significant oversupply – and that is not something we have got at the moment. I’m not underestimating the position that we have in relation to the cost of living. But individuals as well as banks and organisations are relatively well-funded and employment is in a good place.”
But then, every downturn is different. “[The GFC was] unique in terms of the feeling,” Beardmore-Gray says. “If you were somebody who had been brought up in the City and or Manhattan or Hong Kong, the atmosphere on the streets was extraordinary. It was something that I had never experienced before and never experienced after. The Russian crisis in ’98 was totally different. The dotcom crisis was totally different. And therefore, once you have been through a number of these big changes, the key thing you realise and you remember, is that the robustness and the ability for these great centres to reinvent themselves and evolve and change is amazing.”
Reinvention, evolution, change. The best real estate agencies will play a part in driving it all, in Beardmore-Gray’s view. And he wants to people behind the places to be proud of that.
To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews
