Bayleys continues to expand its real estate services

Bayleys continues to expand its real estate services in Taranaki

Leading real estate agency Bayleys Taranaki is continuing to expand its business activities across the region – acquiring the rental portfolio of a competitor and subsequently becoming one of the area’s biggest residential rental property companies.

Bayleys Taranaki has this month completed the purchase of the rental portfolio of houses managed by boutique property management firm Executive Living Ltd which administers letting of high-end homes in and around New Plymouth – predominantly servicing senior management employed by companies in the oil and gas sector.

The buy-out of Executive Living Ltd’s rental portfolio comes just a few weeks after Bayleys acquired the similarly sized rental portfolio of Taranaki homes administered by Property Place Ltd in November.

The Executive Living Ltd residential rental portfolio of houses will now be integrated into Bayleys’ existing inventory of homes, including those from Property Place Ltd, being let and managed – growing the business by 33 percent. Executive Living Ltd will now focus solely on apartment rentals.

As a result of the Property Place acquisition, the company’s former property manager Tracey Jago joined Bayleys as a portfolio manager.

The acquisition of the commercial activities from both Executive Living Ltd and Property Place Ltd tops off 12 months of rapid expansion by Bayleys Taranaki, which earlier in 2012 bought out rival real estate agency Harvey Taylor and integrated its personnel within the Bayleys sales ranks across both the residential and commercial and industrial sectors.

Bayleys Taranaki co-owner Neale Parkinson said the company’s on-going expansion reflected a growing return of confidence to the region’s real estate markets – underpinned by the industrial and rural sectors.

“Taranaki’s economy is in the fortunate position of deriving a considerable proportion of its revenues from black gold, oil, and white gold, milk. Demand for both products, while fluctuating over the short term, has continued to show growth over the medium and longer terms,” Mr Parkinson said.

“This broader economic confidence has in turn supported the Taranaki housing market and helped otherwise mitigate some of the pricing falls seen in other cities around New Zealand. As the wider national economy continues to improve, Bayleys, like many other Taranaki businesses, is taking a more optimistic view of commercial activity – hence undertaking the acquisitions that we have, in the time frame that we have.”

Mr Parkinson said that the growth of the agency’s rental portfolio past a critical mass stage would benefit customers by delivering a more streamlined and efficient service with far lower overheads – enabling fees and charges to be kept to an absolute minimum.

“With the much bigger property rental and management portfolio which we are now responsible for, the cost of fixed overheads - which every company has to bear - is now spread far greater. That makes for a far more efficiently run back-office system,” he said.

“From another perspective, the larger property portfolio means we can negotiate better contract rates with trade and services providers such as plumbers, electricians and builders, whom we manage on behalf of rental clients.

“The overall financial performance improvement in these efficiencies for our clients in just a short space of time has been marked, and will continue to improve even further as the Executive Living properties are integrated.”

Mr Parkinson said Bayleys Taranaki would continue looking at other commercial expansion opportunities in the province, with a view to growing the scope and scale of its activities this year.

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