From Panama to Yeovil
Property Week – August 2008
Ex-London & Regional man Jason Mills is now working in Somerset. Christine Eade reports.
Later this summer, South Somerset District Council could give permission for Yeovil’s first business park – the 600,000 sq ft Bunford Park to the west of the town close to the A303.
The planning application comes from Yeovil-based Abbey Manor Capital Partners (AMCAP), a private company that is predictably excited to achieve a ‘first’ on its own doorstep.
What is more amazing to the wider world, however, is that the planning application was submitted by Jason Mills, AMCAP’s managing director, who was responsible for the world’s largest property transaction in 2007.
Mills, as international development director of London & Regional, negotiated its £352.5m purchase of the US Air Force base at Howard, Panama, for the development of 50 million sq.ft on 1,980 acres. He won the bid by offering just over £1m more than the underbidder.
Today, instead of the flight to Panama, the daily commute is a drive through Somerset country lanes from a village six miles from the sea. The reason behind his change of lifestyle? Two words: ‘equity stake’.
As long as he worked with Ian and Richard Livingstone at London & Regional, he knew the entrepreneurial brothers would not give him a share of their company. And, with Ian relocating to Monte Carlo and Richard in South Africa, there was no longer a chance to learn on a daily basis from two of property’s fastest-rising stars.
Recalling the old Panama days, Mills says: ‘It took two years of my life – I led the process and submitted the bid. And when I came back to London, I really wanted a new challenge. ‘Maybe people will question what I did. To work for the Livingstones, with an international remit and then to move to the West Country seems unusual. But when you work with them, you learn so much, and it raises your level of expectation and ambition. You couldn’t work for a better large property company.’
He realised that to set up his own development company in London would be highly competitive, compared with the West Country, where he knew the area, having graduated with a planning degree from Bristol University. He also has a holiday home in Somerset and had travelled in the west when negotiating sale-and-leaseback deals of Texaco filling stations for London & Regional.
Mills also knew Nigel Timmis, managing director of a family company, Abbey Manor Group, a developer and investor in property that also owns serviced office and waste management businesses. ‘Nigel took the line that people have to be incentivised in a management team, and we talked about my joining a new company with an equity stake,’ says Mills.
Mills joined Abbey Manor in September and by May Timmis had set up Abbey Manor Capital Partners. Mills became managing director with a 25% shareholding, while finance director Ian Bowker has a 15% holding and Timmis, as chairman, has kept 60% in the family.
AMCAP was sent off into the world with a dowry of Abbey Manor’s £200m 1.25m sq.ft development programme that includes not only Bunford but Solstice Park, a business park at Amesbury, Wiltshire, and Firepool Lock, 12 acres of rail marshalling yards at Taunton, which is now being converted into a housing development.
AMCAP is also getting involved in joint ventures, the first being with fellow Somerset developer Summerfield, to develop Weston Gateway, a 390,000 sq ft business park at Weston-super-Mare. Mills believes the partnership will suit him well because it was a structure pioneered by Amec, where he worked before London & Regional. AMCAP will provide the seed capital before third-party funding.
Meanwhile, Mills is looking forward to Bunford with the characteristic enthusiasm of any developer, and is already quoting office rents of up to £17/sq ft.
‘We will start to launch the project just before Christmas,’ he says. ‘There is already strong interest in the first phase. We have never had a purpose-built business park. Most of what Yeovil offers is based in town in period buildings.’
The first phase is perhaps 100,000 sq ft – tiny compared with the Panama development. But as Mills says: ‘Panama was the world’s largest development deal, but all you are doing is individual phases of the development, which are no different from anything else.’
But he confesses that he may one day visit Google Earth to check on Panama’s progress.