Group shrinks ambitions from 20,000 to just 12,000 homes a year in an attempt to balance the books.
T he entire housebuilding sector is in a funk, grumbling about energy prices, the cost of labour, regulation, planning delays, taxes and more, but few have messed up a bad hand like Vistry. Three years ago this mashup of the Bovis, Linden and Countryside brands aspired to build 20,000 houses a year, and made itself the darling of the incoming Labour government by betting big on “affordable mixed-tenure housing” in partnership with councils, housing associations and institutional landlords.
The City, too, fell for former executive chair Greg Fitzgerald’s promise that a “capital light” approach of pre-selling homes via a partnership model would yield oodles of cash. The share price doubled to almost £14 between October 2023 and August 2024.
Fitzgerald left in May after too many profit warnings and now, with the shares down to the bare foundations of 262p, it’s time for new chief executive Adam Daniels’ review of what happened. Short version: the logic of the partnership stuff wasn’t so silly, but the execution was horrible, especially in the south of England.
For good measure, a proportion of the land bank would not be acquired “under the investment approval criteria that will be applied in the future”, which read as a confession that Vistry overpaid for plots.
The aim is to build 12,000 houses a year, rather than the 20,000-plus imagined by Fitzgerald.