The deal by which Martin & Co acquired Legal & General’s estate agency wing for £6m took ten months.

But despite it taking so long, the news did not leak out at any time until the announcement to the Stock Exchange on Friday morning.

Neither the 75 franchise owners within Xperience nor the existing 200 or so Martin & Co franchisees knew of it until then.

Martin & Co chief executive Ian Wilson told Eye that he will now be talking all of the new franchisees in a series of regional meetings.

He said: “Right at the moment, all of our franchisees in both camps are probably feeling a bit bemused.”

A key message is that almost all the brands – CJ Hole, Parkers and Whiteacres – will be kept.

The one possible exception is Ellis & Co, in London, where there are 20 offices, of which only two have any overlap with the existing 26 Martin & Co offices.

Wilson said there could be a rebrand of either the Ellis & Co branches to Martin & Co – or even the other way round.

He emphasised: “We shall talk to those franchise owners first.

“We are not going to do as Hunters did with Bairstow Eves and insist on a rebrand.

“We understand that franchise owners are very passionate about their name.

“Legal & General have been an exceptionally good caretaker of the brands, but estate agency is not core to them.

“We intend to pour love, care and attention into those brands.”

He said there was plenty of scope to recruit into the CJ Hole, Parkers and Whitegates brands, and to grow these regionally.

He also heaped praise on some of the Xperience businesses: “As of today, six of the Xperience agents would be in the Martin & Co top ten – and one of our aims will be to promote friendly rivalry.”

Wilson said it made perfect sense for the Martin & Co group to trade under several names: “It works for LSL and it works for Countrywide – it will work for us,” he said.

Wilson said he also welcomed Xperience boss Michael Stoop as the new group managing director.

He said: “Michael has excellent connections and has heavyweight expertise in sales which we – as traditional letting specialists – do not have.” He said this would be invaluable to the 150 or so businesses in the Martin & Co network which have expanded into sales.

He said that 7% of group revenue from those businesses had come from sales – “That’s £1m of revenue that we would not otherwise have had.”

He added: “However, that 7% compares with nearly 49% derived from sales by the Xperience brands.”

Wilson said of the deal that it had been enabled by Martin & Co’s flotation on the stock market last December, raising funds for acquisitions.

Wilson did not hang around. While there was no For Sale sign over Xperience, he picked up the phone to Stoop and saw him on the morning of January 6. In the afternoon, he saw Legal & General chairman Stephen Smith.

Wilson says it was immediately clear that Martin & Co was an ambitious business, while Legal & General’s interest in estate agency was as a distribution network for its financial products.

The purchase is tied in with a ten-year deal by which Legal & General provides all Martin & Co franchisees with access to mortgage, life assurance and general insurance products. “So Legal & General have got out of the deal what they wanted – a much larger distribution network,” said Wilson.

He said he felt that £6m was a fair price, reflecting a profit likely to be £600,000 to £700,000 this year.

Wilson also made it clear that the Xperience deal is just the start.

He told Eye: “We’re not going to stop. We would like to bring another franchise company into our system. We have got a fantastic model.

“But we are going to stick to franchising. We’ll leave it to others to go into corporate agency. That’s not for us.”

While Martin & Co has one corporately owned business at the moment, it has found a buyer who plans to complete at the end of the year.

Wilson, who also has a recently agreed £5m loan facility from Santander, said: “The point about a deal on the scale of the Xperience one is that it gives you much more buying power.”

Post-acquisition, the Martin & Co group now has five brands and 282 offices, with a portfolio of 43,000 managed rental properties.

In September, it announced a record revenue performance for the year to the end of June – 16% up on the previous year, at £2.3m.

* During the interview, on a busy morning for him last Friday, Ian Wilson recalled meeting Eye’s editor some years ago. He had not been in his post long, had a very heavy cold and should probably have cancelled, but he was emphatic that he would grow Martin & Co to a big national presence.

On Friday, Wilson said: “I can still remember the expression on your face when I said that. I could see you were thinking I wasn’t well and maybe it was the medication for the cold that was talking.”

Well – he meant it and he has done it.