Devonshire Homes has entered administration, with joint administrators appointed to oversee the affairs of the regional housebuilder.
Sarah Collins and Jonathan Marston of Alvarez & Marsal Europe were appointed joint administrators after the company filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators earlier this month.
The Devon-based developer, chaired by former Conservative MP David Heathcoat-Armory, reported turnover of £52m in its most recent accounts and employed close to 80 staff during the year to 30 September 2024. The company, founded in the early 1990s, recorded a pre-tax loss of £137,024 for the period.
The administration includes two live developments: The Grange in Bideford, a 225-home scheme, and St Michael’s Reach in Penzance, which was due to deliver 320 homes.
Administrators said the appointment relates solely to Devonshire Homes Ltd and does not affect other Devonshire-branded developments or associated companies.
In its latest accounts, Devonshire Homes disclosed an expected loss of £1.3m linked to a partly completed development acquired by the company. The builder said it had significantly underestimated construction costs on a scheme comprising a high proportion of bespoke timber-frame homes, a type of development it described as being outside its core business model.
The company stated that future land acquisitions would be restricted to schemes using its own standard house types. During the year, it recorded a loss of £156,099 and made a provision of £1.12m against the anticipated total loss on the project.
The firm’s auditors also warned of a “material uncertainty related to going concern” in the accounts published last October, citing the need for additional funding to support existing and future developments.
Devonshire’s collapse won’t have come out of nowhere – the going-concern warning in last October’s accounts was the tell. I run GalimAI, where we map UK property and company data, and across the companies we track we hold 542,937 Gazette notices alongside live filing and charge histories. The pattern with housebuilder and property-company failures is almost always the same: overdue accounts, then an auditor going-concern flag, then charges being called in – usually months before an administrator is appointed. For anyone exposed to a developer (sub-contractors, suppliers, off-plan buyers on the Bideford and Penzance schemes), those early filings are worth watching, because the formal insolvency notice tends to be the last signal, not the first. – Dror, GalimAI
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