When the late John Sims founded io from a basement at 105 Park Street, W1 in 1987, he could not have known what impact it would make on industrial property management and investment.
Not only did he practically invent a new way of driving returns on industrial estates through a process now common but then revolutionary, but io spawned over a dozen new companies that are still affecting the property landscape.
Even where it cannot be claimed that specific companies were io’s direct progeny, the strands provide a fascinating insight into the cloistered world of industrial investment.
Sims grew the business from a staff of six with £35m in assets to floating io on the stock market in 2002, under the new name Property Fund Management, with £1.1bn of funds under management. PFM was sold to Teesland in 2004.
“He did revolutionise industrial estates as assets,” says io Asset Management’s managing partner, Angus Scott Brown – who with Sims, and capital from Grosvenor, relaunched the brand in 2012. “Industrial property was not on institutional investors’ radar. It was not mainstream, as it is today. He brought an innovative approach to multi-let industrial by providing mainstream investors with a fund manager into a sector they had found undesirable.”
One person who worked with Sims in the mid-1990s is Jeff Hobby, director and founder of industrial developer/investor Dunmoore. He says: “John Sims was a very intense bloke. He had a huge amount of energy and drive.
“We were doing something that was quite dramatic in this basement in Park Street. He put together an amazing bunch of people and they were exciting times. There was a really good buzz, but it was a bit of a white-knuckle ride.
“We did a deal with Hermes that outperformed every metric they had. It went so well that John Ritblat [then CEO and chairman of British Land] wanted to know how we had done it.”
io’s joint venture with the National Coal Board, CINIO, continued the trend-busting formula. Between 1990 and 1995, it outperformed the IPD industrial index by 710 basis points on average annually – 14% a year, compared with IPD’s 6.9%.
In 2012, Sims teamed up with Angus Scott-Brown to relaunch the brand through io Asset Management (IOAM). They set up a new investment vehicle with funding from Grosvenor, which is managed by IOAM.
The group now has about 400,000 sq ft of industrial stock, purchased for £17.7m, under ownership on seven industrial estates, as far afield as Bristol and Bradford.
“There are uninvested funds at our disposal and we should be able to double the size of the estate by the end of the year,” says director of asset management, James Allen, who first joined the io group in 2001 to handle the acquisition and management of industrial assets for UK funds.
