Blowout parties and company ski trips: How London’s ‘top estate agent’ spends your rent
Blowout parties and company ski trips: How London’s ‘top estate agent’ spends your rent
Foxtons is ‘bringing the fun back’ — amid a surge in lettings income
Morning — how is all that rent Londoners pay each month actually being spent? Well, we’ve had a good insight into what estate agents do with their cut courtesy of Foxtons, one of the biggest managers of tenancies across the capital. The estate agent’s new boss has been pretty frank about his current push to bring “more noise, more energy” to the London lettings business — parties, silly cars, ski trips. And guess what: newly published Foxton accounts show they’re earning loads in the process. That’s after your Sunday round-up below.
Plus: what London got in the Budget, a famous venue finally re-opens, and Adam Sandler plays basketball in Kensington.
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What we’ve spied
🤑 Some surprising spoils for London in the Chancellor’s Budget on Wednesday:
Jeremy Hunt announced £118m for 750 new homes in Canary Wharf — and, unexpectedly, the cash is being given as ‘levelling-up’ funding. That’s raised the eyebrows of some, who expect that kind of money to go to parts of the UK lagging behind London, not one of the capital’s shiny financial centres. Others point out that Canary Wharf is having a bit of a wobble at the moment, with major banks exiting the district over the past few months. And then there’s those that say London always needs more homes.
Hunt also earmarked £124m for 7,200 homes in Barking Riverside. The 440-acre brownfield site by the Thames is already a major development hub, and it’ll eventually have 10,800 homes and a population of around 26,000.
One last housing announcement — the government is establishing something called the Euston Housing Delivery Group. It’s a new body with £4m in initial funding to figure out how all the HS2 construction work around Euston could also mean 10,000 new homes.
Finally, the National Theatre is getting £26m to help upgrade its stages. There are a few bits at the South Bank building in need of repair, like the scenery lift at its Olivier theatre. The funding was announced alongside a package of tax breaks for the UK film industry, much of which is based in the capital.
🤔 But also, some notable Budget absences:
London borough councils say their finances have been left under a “relentless squeeze”. London Councils, the umbrella body for the capital’s town halls, criticised “the Budget’s lack of action on homelessness” in particular — one in 50 Londoners is currently homeless, and the boroughs are spending £90m on temporary accommodation. Bankruptcy risks are all too real in London right now, as Havering is demonstrating.
Rumoured plans of 99% mortgages didn’t materialise. Hunt didn’t announce the government-backed scheme despite some teasers in preview coverage — though there was some scepticism anyway of whether it could be effective for London’s pricy market.
Still no sign the government is giving the TfL the cash to extend the DLR. Funding for the project to take the line eastwards through Thamesmead is still up in the air.
🎙️ The Brixton Academy is re-opening in April, 16 months on from the fatal crowd crush, though with a weird initial line-up. Rather than famous bands, tribute acts are on the bill for the Academy’s opening nights, as the venue re-opens with strict licensing and conditions imposed after the tragedy in December 2022. At one point the Met Police was trying to get the venue to permanently close its doors, but in September Lambeth council ruled that the Academy could reopen subject to 77 conditions, ranging from changing its ticketing system to evacuation plans. The police investigation into the crush is still ongoing though, with officers recently issuing a fresh plea for witnesses on the night, which saw two people killed. Worth reading: this in-depth report on how survivors are still picking up the pieces. Elsewhere in venue news: Bush Hall in west London could shut if it can’t raise £42,000 in the next four months. Plus: a 1,600-capacity warehouse club, Archives, is opening in Tottenham Hale.
🏊♀️ Here we were thinking a new sauna was the biggest controversy on Hampstead Heath at the moment — now there’s a row over letting trans women continue to use the ladies’ ponds. The Kenwood Ladies' Pond Association held its annual general meeting at the weekend, where gender-critical campaigners proposed a motion to ban trans women from using the north London bathing spot. It was voted down, but the meeting descended into a shouting match, with cries of “traitors” and “shame on you”. One campaigner, Venice Allan, was filmed standing on a chair and giving a speech after the vote, in which she said: “I hope you wake up in the middle of the night and remember that you made that act of male violence in a sacred woman’s space possible”. Trans women have been allowed to use the pond since 2019 when the City of London Corporation, which manages Hampstead Heath, adopted a gender identity policy it said was needed to be ‘fully compliant with the Equality Act 2010’.
❌ A fertility clinic in east London has had its license suspended after losing embryos. Homerton Fertility Centre has been ordered to shut down by regulators as they investigate a string of incidents involving errors in some freezing processes, which the clinic says resulted in the “tragic loss of a small number of embryos”. It follows last month’s revelation that more than 100 patients who had eggs and embryos at Guy’s Hospital in London had been told they may have been damaged due to fault in the freezing process.
📣 Claims London has become a “no-go zone for Jews” dominated national headlines this week. On Tuesday the Evening Standard ran the front page “London’s antisemitism shame”, reporting that growing numbers of Jewish Londoners are considering fleeing the capital because of rising antisemitism. On the same day, former home secretary Suella Braverman said that pro-Palestinian protests had turned parts of London into “no-go” areas for Jewish people. This was echoed by Robin Simcox, the government’s new counter-extremism adviser, who on Thursday wrote in a comment piece in the Telegraph: “We will not have become an authoritarian state if London is no longer permitted to be turned into a no-go zone for Jews every weekend”. Many have criticised the rhetoric — march organisers have said Jewish people did not need to be scared of the events, some Jewish march attendees say it hasn’t reflected their experience, and David Baddiel is among those who say the ‘no-go’ comments are “just inflammatory”.
🐶 Camden is currently considering whether to become the first UK council to ban Bully XLs from its estates. A few councillors have been pushing for the ban, which would mean any tenant or leaseholder on a Camden estate would be banned from owning a Bully, and recently the council’s housing chief signalled he was taking a look. When we asked the council’s press office for clarification this week, a spokesperson told the Spy: “We are aware of the legal statutory changes with this breed. We want to ensure that our estates remain safe and will be reviewing our approach in partnership with the police.”
🚗 Anti-LTN campaigners are in high spirits after a council pulled the plug on a controversial traffic scheme in south London. Opposition to the Streatham Wells low-traffic neighbourhood has been rumbling ever since its rollout last year, with locals pointing to rising congestion and claiming local buses were having to take three-mile diversions to get around it. Anti-LTN protests aren’t new for London, but in this case even Sadiq Khan joined criticism for the first time — last month the mayor said the Streatham Wells LTN was causing “huge problems”. Lambeth council caved in this week and suspended the LTN, with its leader saying: “We’ve listened to the concerns raised by local people and recognise the major disruption coming as part of transport improvements on the main road running through Streatham”. Elsewhere in traffic schemes: Sadiq Khan has given the Guardian a sneak peek at an analysis that’s found London cut road pollution faster than the rest of the UK, with a sizeable proportion of the fall attributed to the ULEZ expansion.
👭 MPs published a wide-ranging report on sexism in the City this week, finding that women working in London’s financial district still face “shocking” levels of misogyny and sexual harassment. The Treasury Committee said efforts to tackle sexism in the Square Mile are moving at a “snail’s pace”, and that action is needed to end the “era of impunity” which is “holding back women” in their careers.
👮♂️ The Met Police firearms officer charged with the murder of Chris Kaba has been named as 40-year-old Martyn Blake. A judge ruled Blake’s name and date of birth could be reported on Friday, ahead of his trial later this year over the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Kaba in Streatham Hill in September 2022. Elsewhere in emergency services: the London Fire Brigade has now been taken out of special measures. The service had been placed under an enhanced level of monitoring following a report in 2022 that found it was “institutionally misogynist and racist”.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with:
Hollywood’s Adam Sandler randomly turning up for basketball in Kensington
Channel 4’s new documentary on the Hampstead paedophile hoax
An interactive map of potential areas for densification in London
News that Cycleway 4 is now complete, connecting London Bridge and Greenwich
A double-decker bus crashed into a pub in Tottenham Court Road
A first look inside the controversial Silvertown Tunnel, now that boring has finished
A wedding on a moving train from London Paddington
Glitz and glamour in London lettings
It’s apparently a “fun” time to work at Foxtons, one of London’s biggest lettings agencies, which manages nearly 30,000 tenancies for landlords across the city. Staff are being treated to more blowout parties, luxury ski trips and fancy company cars, ever since a new CEO took over in 2022 to bring “more energy” to its tired corporate culture. And then this week, something really fun for the Foxtons family: a huge jump in revenue during the worst year for London renters in recent memory.
Foxtons posted its financial results for 2023 on Tuesday, giving us a first look at how surging rents in the capital last year pumped up estate agent balance sheets. It shows the company bagged £101m from tenancies in 2023, an inflation-busting rise of 16% on the £87m it earned in 2022. And revenues rose despite the company letting out 6% fewer properties than last year, as the supply of new rental properties shrank across London.
It’s exactly the kind of “high performance” result the new CEO, Guy Gittins, is all about. Last January, Gittins sat down for an interview with the Telegraph, in which he explained his plan to “bring the fun back” to Foxtons and return the company to the glory days of the 2000s, when its name was synonymous with the bullish, pre-2008 London property market. Gittins’s first move has been to bring back the company’s flashy fleet of green and yellow Minis, previously abandoned by management for low-cost, low-key alternatives. They’re mostly for the office newbies though — former employees say you can eventually upgrade to a Range Rover or Porsche without the garish Foxtons branding if you meet your targets.
Indeed, creating more incentives for its army of London estate agents has been one of Gittins’s priorities. He’s brought back group holidays for the best performers, with last year’s top 100 heading to the slopes of Courmayeur, an Italian ski resort. The office parties have been dialled up — whether on boats, or black-tie affairs at Christmas. At Foxtons’ headquarters in Chiswick, dance music now plays through speakers and live leaderboards of staff sales adorn the walls. When someone lands a deal, they slam a big red button and everyone applauds. Completing the Selling Sunset vibes is Gittins’s approach to employee uniform: “I always tell my team that in this job you can never overdress”.
Foxtons’s lettings portfolio has certainly been working harder under Gittins. Tuesday’s results show that the company has gone from making £4,210 per letting deal in 2022 to £5,234 in 2023 — a whopping 24% rise. That’s a pretty big jump, considering the more restrained tone Gittins displayed when he was interviewed by the Guardian a couple of months ago. “We absolutely do not welcome 20% rent increases in a year,” he said. “It’s not good for London, it’s terrible for tenants”. Of course, worth mentioning Foxtons doesn’t bank all the rent from the tenancies it’s involved in — but, as lettings manager, they do get a cut.
For a while now, Foxtons has been turning its focus away from selling London property to helping rent it out. Back in 2013, when the company first went public and listed on the stock exchange, just under half of its revenue, 48%, came from lettings. Today, cash from tenancies now accounts for 70% of Foxtons’s revenue. That focus is likely to continue in the short term — Tuesday’s results show the company’s income from property sales fell in 2023, amid the housing market’s recent downturn.
It’s a trend seen in other London estate agencies. But in Foxtons’s case, the switch is partly the result of pressure from shareholders, angered by the company’s share price losing about 90% of its value since 2013. Things came to a head in June 2022, before Gittins was CEO, when one of Foxtons’s key investors, Catalist Partners, published a lengthy dossier claiming the estate agent had “lost its way”. By September, Gittins had been appointed, promising to bolster Foxtons’s rental business in the capital, and Catalist had changed its tune. “Guy was top of our list. He hasn’t been [the] boss of a public company but he is one of the few CEOs who understands data,” said Robin Paterson, Catalist’s founder, at the time. “Lettings are quick wins… There’s so much low-hanging fruit in London for him to sort out”.
To summarise Gittins’s new philosophy for Foxtons, it’s to not have shame. “We have to dial everything up,” Gittins told the FT a couple of months into the job. “We became embarrassed by what we do. We have to be proud to be estate agents”. What his new office culture looks like in practice is messier though, if recent Glassdoor reviews from former Foxtons employees are anything to go by. In the pro column, reviewers highlight the “money and people”, as well as the benefits and training. “You get out what you put in,” writes one. And some are clearly getting a lot out — pay data shows an average lettings negotiator in London is paid a base salary of around £23,000, but then gets an additional £94,000 in bonuses. There’s even one senior Foxtons lettings negotiator reporting total pay of £604,000. But in the cons, reviewers highlight long hours, high pressure on targets and micromanaging. They write: “heavy hustle culture”, “it is very dog eat dog”, “your life is the company”. One reviewer was especially blunt: “Long hours, gossip, everyone has sex with each other”.
Ask tenants though, and you’re likely to get very different answers. Foxtons has often been a name associated with the worst excesses of renting in London. A few examples: in 2019, the estate agent showed a couple round a two-bed flat in Brixton that they fell in love with — only for Foxtons to then sign them up for a smaller one-bed flat in the same building without their knowledge. In 2022, tenants in Peckham faced eviction after Foxtons tried to charge their landlord a £7,000 fee just to change estate agents. That year also saw Foxtons lose a tribunal case after charging tenants in Wandsworth an extra £250 fee on top of their rent for a short-term let, which had been banned years prior by the Tenant Fees Act. More recently, in February 2023, a tenant in Streatham was left homeless after Foxtons and the landlord failed to deal with a black mould problem in their flat — a case that was even criticised by mayor Sadiq Khan, who lived a few doors down. Even outside of these extreme cases, Foxtons can invoke memories of frustration. Friends of the Spy recounted poor cleanliness when they arrived for the first time at a Foxtons-managed house in Tooting, then delays in getting a mouse infestation sorted — and then, one day, an accidental email from their property manager about ‘swinging’.
Foxtons is also regularly associated with gentrification in London. When the estate agent opened a branch in Brixton in 2013, it was met with anti-gentrification protests, with activists sneaking in to put up a banner that read “Yuppies Out”. Later in 2015, the branch’s windows were smashed and messages of “No Evictions” were spray painted inside. “You walk around with a target on your back. People are gunna hate,” former Foxtons estate agent Jeremy Jacob recalls in a YouTube video on his experience working there.
But Foxtons and Gittins insist they too want to see London’s rental crisis solved, often citing the “supply and demand imbalance” as the ultimate cause of tenants' woes. “If everyone is fighting for the property, it’s stressful. Guess what, it’s stressful for the agent too, it’s not an environment we welcome,” Gittins has previously said. And when the Spy contacted Foxtons for comment for this piece, we were pointed to this excerpt from its recent annual report:
“The continued growth in the imbalance between supply and demand is at the highest levels we have ever seen. This continues to drive rents and is making it more difficult for renters to find affordable accommodation in London. We have written to the Secretary of State for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing & Communities highlighting the challenges private landlords face and how this will negatively impact renters, alongside 7 suggested ways of addressing the supply side issue. This is an increasingly serious issue and we will continue to seek ways to engage with the Government to help ensure London has a sustainable rental market.“
Perhaps reason to be cheerful though, going forward. Aside from publishing its financial results this week, Foxtons also said it expects rent rises to cool down in London this year. While other London estate agents are predicting hikes of up to 4%, Gittins expects closer to 2%. Hopefully, that won’t mean sending the Foxtons top 100 to Butlins next year.