Leisure real estate stalwart David Coffer has acted on billions of pounds of deals and survived five recessions at Davis Coffer Lyons, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. At almost 75, Coffer could be forgiven for thinking about winding down. Instead, as the UK teeters on the brink of another recession, he is preparing to answer the call to arms.
“I’m like a general waiting in his castle,” Coffer says. “I’m waiting to hear the bugles, the men shouting, ‘We’ve got a recession, we can’t operate, can you help me? We need a valuation.’”
That castle is DCL’s stately Portland Place headquarters, W1, where Winston Churchill met his wife, Clementine Hozier, in 1908. When Coffer meets with EG, he is dressed in a bright orange shirt and grey Canali suit. His wood-panelled office is adorned with framed family photos and Churchill memorabilia.
After more than five decades in real estate, Coffer – who also chairs sister M&A boutique Coffer Corporate Leisure – has learnt that the formula for survival in a downturn is to “keep going”. Another rule is to “deal only with people who have got momentum, intention and finance”. “Don’t bother with anyone else,” he says. Agents can also find some pay-off in hard times, since “the best and most loyal client you can create is the client you help in a dilemma”.
It is also worth putting resources into nabbing the low-hanging fruit. “With every market that goes down, there’s something that goes up, so the answer is to see where you’re going to make your money and concentrate on that,” says Coffer.
The former Earls Court and Olympia chairman recalls selling gas-powered camping lamps in the 1970s, when recession led to strike action and limited weekly electricity consumption. “I’ve seen so many downturns – they always produce a rich seam of opportunity and profit. People make fortunes in these markets. If you are going to hang on as an agent… that’s where you want to be. The last place you want to be is sitting on your arse saying, ‘Oh no, I don’t own a penny.’”
The best and most loyal client you can create is the client you help in a dilemma
Still fighting
Coffer, never at a loss for a metaphor, compares his 50-year career to that of an explorer on the high seas. “You start out, learn as you go along and discover new lands, problems and fights,” he says.
“In the old days, I’d have been leading at the front of the charge, coming back last,” he adds. “I like fighting and negotiating. That’s what I’m known for. I’m backed by a fabulous team – I can’t do anything without them – but big clients still bring me in to negotiate special situations.”
That fighting spirit stood him in good stead in the early days. “I didn’t have a penny starting out,” he says. “My dad gave me £1,000 – that was the only thing I ever got given, when I was 18, and I never took another penny.”
Starting out as a retail agent, Coffer met Lewis Davis in 1971 and the duo set up Davis Coffer Associates. Its first restaurant client was Pizzaland, the now-defunct chain owned at the time by Daily Mail parent Associated Newspapers. Managing director David Dutton, who had instructed the pair as sole agents on its expansion, gave them a retainer of £7,000 for six sites per year. The duo’s first office was on the fourth floor of a pub, above a Pizzaland on Fleet Street, EC4, with a couple of desks, “quite a lot of mice” and “as much pizza, apple pie and custard as one could eat”. (The company wouldn’t move to 52 Portland Place until 2002.)
The first big fee that the pair earned was around £8,000, from selling a part of Eel Pie Island in Twickenham, which they celebrated with steaks from Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese down the road. “It never got any better than that,” says Coffer.
Not just a dirty word
By the 1980s, there were some 200 Pizzaland locations and the duo became known as restaurant agents, a rarity in the market at that time, says Coffer. He recalls a stigma against restaurants from councils and “butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers” that did not want restaurants coming onto their high streets, with the accompanying smells and refuse. “Leisure was a dirty word,” he says.
And so the agent found largely “unopposed territory” in doing business. After the firm lost the Pizzaland mandate in the early 1980s, the duo continued to act for tenants for a short while before deciding to act solely for landlords. This went hand in hand with a positive shift in investor attitudes towards pubs and restaurants in the following decades.
Besides meeting the Queen twice – including in his capacity as creator of the RICS Property Quiz for charity LionHeart – Coffer counts defining restaurant agency, as it is known today, as one of his greatest career highlights. He recalls working with colleague Trevor Watson on the Red Book, where he helped shape valuations for restaurants beyond a retail context, travelling around the country to educate rotary clubs and the RICS on the burgeoning asset class.
In 1992, Coffer created the Restaurant Property Advisors Society after realising there were only a handful of specialists in the sector. Today, he says, it has grown from just 12 members to around 160.
“Getting the industry and investors to realise there is any value in this class of restaurants, in the end having its own class order in planning and also specialist arbitration with third parties, was very important,” he says.
If problematic waves occur, economically or politically, you’ve got to get on your surfboard and surf those great big monster waves
Surf’s up
The restaurant industry has been battered by the coronavirus pandemic, staff shortages and rising costs, with a record 64% of the biggest restaurant companies falling into the red in the past year, according to accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young. The looming recession and soaring energy bills will only pile on the pressure. However, Coffer has faith that investment activity in leisure property will remain solid. “When you get a recession, people with money, especially overseas buyers, want a home for it, and they see the UK as a very safe haven because of the statutory legalities we have,” he says.
“There is a certain class of restaurants which, in central London, are always in demand rental-wise and gradually that will come back premium-wise. In the suburbs, because of the cultural change of people working from home and not wanting to commute… retail, bars and restaurants are now flourishing in those locations. Where we might have had difficulty selling a property in Clapham before the pandemic, now we tender it and rents and investment values are going up. That’s across the country.”
Together with Coffer Corporate Leisure, which was founded on the back of growing competition from accountants and banks in the early 2000s, the Coffer Group now comprises a team of around 30 agents and professionals. That now includes professionals specialising in care homes and supported living valuations. Further hires are on the horizon. As a backer of CG Restaurants & Bars, Coffer is also involved in the operational sites it owns, including Dirty Martini and Tuttons in Covent Garden.
Geographical expansion, however, has never been on the cards for the agency side. To Coffer, it is more important to know your jungle. “We are in the vanguard of most of the big instructions around the Greater London area and some of the most important strategic locations,” he says. “I didn’t want to expand nationwide or overseas and become 10 offices here and there. And I’m glad I didn’t, because we’d probably have been broke.”
The key to growth and adaptation over the years, he says, is to understand the importance of momentum. “We’re surfers of circumstance at the Coffer Group. If problematic waves occur, economically or politically, you’ve got to get on your surfboard and surf those great big monster waves,” he says. “Get on top of the dilemma. Look out for where you can go to. That’s the art – to understand from experience that things change.”
And Coffer has plenty of surfing techniques to share. “Keep your counsel, don’t moan to people, because your trouble is another’s pleasure,” he says. “Keep working hard at every opportunity in whatever way you feel. And remain friendly and on good terms, to a professional level wherever possible.”
More collaboration between agents is also urged. “Look to share opportunities with fellows,” he says. “There are two fees in every situation – my side and yours. Come together.”
Making gains through losses
Retail and leisure owners, including Landsec and the Crown Estate, have slashed their agency rosters in recent months. But Coffer shrugs off the intensifying competition. “We can’t act for many estates because they conflict with others,” he says. “We’ll lose some of the tiddlers, but we’ll get some of the big ones as well. In 50 years, I’ve learnt that one door shuts and another one normally smashes in your face, but quite often opens up into a vastness.”
Recent leasing deals for the company include securing dining concepts at Broadgate on behalf of British Land. Coffer says the firm has also acted on pub deals transacting at sub-4% yields. Clients include Grosvenor, Shaftesbury, Capital & Counties, Cadogan and Westfield.
As Coffer looks back on his career 50 years on from setting up the agency, he hopes industry peers will agree that he and colleagues have made a firm mark on the leisure sector. His personal sense of style may still turn some heads as well: “Maybe people will say, ‘He wore lovely shirts,’” he says. But thoughts of retirement remain distant, so succession planning is still a way off. “I love working,” says Coffer. “To me, the worst sound in the world is a Hoover. I don’t want to be at home. I want to work. I’m a warrior. I want to go out there fighting.
“It is tough, but it’s a challenge. When you achieve things, the feedback and the benefit means more than the money. It’s the pleasure of knowing you’ve succeeded against adversity.”
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