one to one with
James Moody
MICHAEL DINEEN catches up with the managing director of Redrow London, a pacesetter with
a passion for development. game of pass the parcel. T
“In those days, when they were faced with a new project it was handed from planning to land to technical to commercial and finally to sales chiefs all in separate rooms for consideration. “I wasn’t having any of that, and I said the whole office had to be open plan. Nobody brooding in lonely offices. A team approach was what I wanted from the word go. Some of the directors were a bit miffed, but it had to be and that’s the way we stopped the game of pass the parcel and got teams with all the skills handling each new project.”
Speeding things up in work and play might well be his motto today, though he is happy to admit he made a rather slow start to the world of work while he was still a student.
“I went to a college of further education, which will tell you that my school grades were very low. I was too keen on snowboarding, windsurfing and sailing to allow for study of books.” The college eventually became a poly and then a university in Chelmsford, and during this period young Moody was maturing from idling to working hard enough to obtain a 2:1 - narrowly missing a First, but being honoured as Scholar of the Year. The reformed character also worked on a sandwich course while employed by Wilcon, his first contact with housebuilding and John Tutte. Like many another graduate, he failed to attract work, and for six months he disappeared to the French Alps, working in the hotel industry and filling in time as a ski instructor, but not a good enough one to avoid an inglorious return to Blighty on crutches.
Nothing for it now but to attend an interview with international agents DTZ, recommended by Moody’s father. He spent the next 10 years in the exciting world of top estate agency work, not in a leisurely way though, for he raced through the DTZ ranks, attaining a directorship in the process. James Moody’s preference for residential property led him to answering a demand to grow a unit as managing director with a staff of 150 in
16| January 2014 showhouse
he first thing James Moody did when he joined Crest Nicholson, his first major role at a housebuilder, was to abolish the company’s traditional
this sphere, based in the fashionable Curzon Street, Mayfair. He was still only 27. “I was working for years as a consultant to housebuilders but never got full ownership of a development, yet what I really wanted was to be able to touch the product I was dealing with.” Impatient again for a move onward, he felt he had gone as far as he could with DTZ. In fact, he told me, he had reached stagnation when one day he took a routine working luncheon with a housebuilder client Stephen Stone at Crest Nicholson. By Moody’s account it was a merry and bibulous occasion: “Two Essex boys together enjoying exchanging views on what the future held, and out of the blue he told me Crest was looking for someone to run a new Eastern Region office. Could that be me? “Well, I decided to sleep on it and the next day we met again and spent several hours writing a business plan for Crest’s new office.” Moody started the new division from scratch, finding, or rather founding a board of directors and a staff to run the new show. Pioneering stuff. As MD of the region he acquired a huge project in Cambridge, valued at £100m. It was a joint venture and involved a six-day planning enquiry – which rejected the application. Fortunately, Moody and his team, now operating an open-plan management system, were able to steer the scheme successfully through an appeal, and since then the region has prospered, surviving the bank-led debacle that hit housebuilding in 2008. This hitch – when all at Crest Nicholson had to reapply for their jobs during group reorganisation – gave Moody an attractive sporting option. “With the severance pay I would have been able to afford to take my family snowboarding in the French Alps for six months,” he told me with his usual expression of cheerful optimism. Clearly it was an attractive thought. “But I went into the office the next day and, of course, found I couldn’t leave the unfinished work of reorganisation, and all those houses still to be built. I had to see it through.” At this stage I asked him: “You actually like houses, don’t you?”
“I must do. I built my own two years ago.
I bid for land without planning and with a restrictive covenant.”
He seemed to be challenging me to ask, then why do it? But, with Moody, his spontaneous enthusiasm conceals the fact that he’d already done enough research to know before the auction that he would indeed build his dream home on that piece of land.
And the process gave him added insight into handling what he was employed to do at Crest Nicholson.
“I laid about five bricks, but subbed everything else out and paid a site manager to do the rest.” Once more I was struck by the speed with which he got all this done. The auction was in October, plans were drawn by December and approval came in February when work began. He doesn’t hang about.
His move to Redrow as managing director for its London region involved more pioneering, but he was actually prompted to move from a successful spell with Crest Nicholson by his 40th birthday.
“I asked myself what I wanted to do for the next 10 years and one thing was to move back into central London. So when a head-hunter came up with my name for Redrow I knew the time was ripe.”
The opportunity to work with another industry great in Steve Morgan and for John Tutte, my first boss, was not to be passed up." Redrow's brief is for Moody to grow the London region from its present £100m turnover to £250m in the next couple of years and thus have the group up there with the top developers in the
capital.To do this they are buying new opportunities and have secured close to £1bn of GDV in Moody's short time with the business. But don't forget James Moody is a man in a hurry and with that he was off on his Vespa through the streets of London. sh
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