Roberts & Co, the estate agency that has called in administrators, made a pre-tax loss of £248,542 in the year to last July, 2019.
The figure is revealed in a flyer circulated to potential buyers of the company, which had been faced with a winding-up petition from HMRC. It is understood a sale may now have been agreed.
The unaudited accounts in the document show a turnover of £1,694,149 – down from the previous year’s figure of £2,200,464, when the firm made a pre-tax profit of £81,685.
Commercial agents Sanderson Weatherall, acting on the instructions of the administrators of Roberts & Co, were inviting expressions of interest by no later than 5pm on Monday this week.
Their document gives four years of accounts, going back to the year to the end of July 2016. Anyone wanting to know more would had to have signed a non-disclosure agreement.
The document also says that the business has a staff of around 60, operating from nine leasehold premises.
The business is said to have a ‘healthy pipeline of instructions’.
In the London Gazette, it has been noted that there was a petition to wind up the company on January 31, with administrators appointed on February 10.
The administrator is Christopher Brooksbank, of O’Haras.
Companies House is now also describing the company as being in administration.
Roberts & Co was founded by Alan Darlow MBE, who had previously started and built up Darlows into a 100-branch chain before it went into administration some 20 years ago. Darlows was bought by Spicerhaart, and continues as one of its brands.
Comments (11)
Now we see why so many property companies are registered as in distress in recent surveys.
Chris: ‘Either horrifically low fees or somebody’s rinsing it’. Either way, some horrific over trading here!
Hillofwad: your (not so) veiled Sheep message does endorse that a franchise in the wrong hands is a dangerous enterprise – I mean that from both a franchisor and franchisee perspective. The franchisor gets their cut from the gross revenues, the franchisee from net profits, so a short sighted franchisor pushes the naive newbie franchisee into overtrading. Said franchisee goes south fairly quickly and franchisor loses potential longer term revenue which could have been had from a successful franchise. It does put added pressure on the franchisor to keep selling franchises!
Administrators – do they get the best for the biz owners and creditors out of situations like this. Firstly their terminology – a healthy pipeline of instructions. Pipelines are sales building up to completion which no doubt they will keep to pay off creditors. or Do they mean A healthy Register of Instructions – the time they take to sort things out and get an offer to contract the register will disappear in to the wind with other agents letter writing/door knocking etc etc. The figures make you laugh or cry 2016 they T/O 2.2M and make 20K profit – 1%! Either horrifically low fees or somebody’s rinsing it. Makes you wonder how many other biz operate like this, presumably keep going on the back of PAYE & VAT until HMRC step in and not trading on a level playing field with their competitors – they are the ones that I feel sorry for.
You only have to look at the previous track record of the main shareholder(s) to determine why the profit figures are so low against income.
The stories of failures and losses incurred are normally well buried in the industry and rarely make headlines.
Alan Darlow Mr. “Black and Amber” fingers in other pies has always been the type of individual who bounces back but a different story for the less hardy and experienced
Recent estate agent franchisees at one specific operater,subsidiary of a listed company already disappeared off the map where their companies at Companies House there for public record showing deficits of individual franchisees racked up.
£85.036,£78.211,£71,807 ,£56,929. £43,305, £40,326, £36,523 , £35,536, £32,977 £32,566 and that’s just 10 of the 50+
Might as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb comes to mind .
Others in the range of £20- 30,000 and some who never got around to submitting accounts .Those losses lying heavy on shoulders for years to come for
Its’difficult to understand how such losses can be racked up under careful supervision
Puzzeled how businesses can be run like this.
Complete mismanagement.
With 9 offices and 60 staff with that turnover they did well to just loose £80k
60 staff across 9 offices! There lies one of their problems
sounds like 2008 – surely those in the business would have learned a lesson of multi agencies that went to the wall then
£80k profit from £2m turnover, what on earth were they doing/spending the money on?
Rightmove? 🙂