Profits at Foxtons crashed by over half last year, the agent said this morning.
In its preliminary results for the year to the end of December, pre-tax profits were £18.8m – down from £41m the year before.
Group EBITDA was also well down, from £46m to £24.6m, and the adjusted EBITDA margin stood at 18.5%, down from 30.7% in 2015.
Group revenue was down from £149.8m in 2015 to £132.7m.
Sales revenue was the big victim, and at £55m was down 23%, driven “by a marked step down in activity in the second half following the EU referendum and Stamp Duty changes”.
The market, said Foxtons, remains tough, especially in central London.
The firm sold 4,026 properties, against 5,558 the previous year, but managed to drive its fee levels up – £13,783 on average per property, against £13,043 the year before.
Lettings revenue was down only slightly, by 1%.
CEO Nic Budden warned: “Should current sales activity continue through the remainder of this year, it is likely that 2017 sales volumes will be well below last year.”
This morning City analyst Anthony Codling of Jefferies said: “Foxtons remains the rock and roll story in the UK’s traditional estate agency market, with a focus on London, the slick speedboat that is Foxtons may well be nimble, lean and fast moving, but it can’t out-run the tides of change.
“As ever Foxtons is not taking the current challenges lying down and it will emerge stronger fitter and leaner than before, but we suspect that the London housing market will see more challenges in 2017 than the UK as a whole.
“However the speedboat is a state of the art one and is not going to sink, but for the time being the ride will be choppy.”
Only circa 19 million PROFIT share price below a quid.
Purple bricks make a loss and worth circa 3 quid a share.
It’s a strange world we live in.
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PB appears the same as ‘last minute.com’. When floated its mkt cap was £760m ish. Last year it’s mkt cap was a meagre (by comparison) £76m. The comparisons both model and financials are very similar. LMDC was the ‘big thing’ of the time as ‘PB’ is now. I’ll take a bet that the same happens with PB. Probably when the next full years results are out and the ‘smokehas cleared a little!
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I ve heard that becuase they are making so much profit PB they are expanding to mars and saturn next month.
They are amazing.
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I heard they had already ‘ring’fenced local property listers for Saturn and that Mars was a trial training project for their new ‘work, rest and play’ rara fest meetings.
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A difficult year so no surprises .One saving grace for shareholders is at least they havent borrowed and spent hundreds of millions like CWD gobbling up other businesses and then shutting the doors . Foxtons modest expansion was all taken organically opening up a fresh office in adjoining territories without incurring debt
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A difficult year it has been however, Foxtons continue to be an Estate Agent as opposed to ‘Retailer’!
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They still made a profit.
We can all recall the days of estate agents losing millions of pounds each year. Business’s are run only to satisfy shareholders by bean counters who seem surprised that the number of property transactions fluctuate wildly depending on the state of the economy or outside influences which they cannot control like stamp duty. There are times you just have to batten down the hatches and ride the storm out. Changing course to avoid the storm and ending up on the rocks is a real possibility. Modern day captains have an ability of being able to avoid going down with the ship when they have made the wrong choice and take to the lifeboat leaving their crew behind to try and salvage the wreck they have caused.
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I wonder to whom you allude?
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Foxtons are still profitable and they have put their fees UP to mitigate some of the loss of volumes. Look and learn.
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