Trafalgar House is to cut 20 staff from its commercial property team by the end of this year and hopes to sell off £100m-worth of its property assets within 12 months.
The redundancies will be phased; three people left in March. The most senior person to go will be Patrick Garner, director of business development, while the others are mainly junior and senior development surveyors. The legal and accounts departments will also lose staff.
Spokesman Tim Halford attributed the move to the state of the property market, the current stage of Trafalgar House’s development cycle and the company cutting costs across the board. “But we are not withdrawing from development. This is a downsizing exercise, not a change in strategy,” he said.
David Calverley, who is a main board director, heads the commercial property team and will have a staff of around 40 people by the end of this year.
The company is writing down its £400m investment and development property portfolio in the UK and America by £100m to £300m. According to Halford, it expects to reduce further the portfolio to between £200m and £250m within a year through a programme of disposals.
