There are family run businesses and then there is The Prideview Group (Prideview). Founded by brothers-in-law Shailesh and Raj Patel in 1985, the Stanmore-based commercial agency is now run on a day-to-day basis by the next generation of the family.
Fittingly, given the name of the business, there is a great deal of family pride both in the business and its role in the community, and as well as a bar, its recently refurbished office boasts a full-wall infographic charting the business’s key milestones to date. There is also a banner on display for the annual Prideview Cricket tournament, which kicked off South Asian Heritage Month (18 July to 17 August) and raised £35,000, taking the total raised over 11 years of the event to more than £200,000.
But the piece de resistance is the boardroom, where the walls – and drink coasters – are adorned with pictures of their most important deals. It is here that three of the family, principals Nilesh, Jesal and Vishal Patel – alongside senior associate and family friend Sejal Kamani – reveal to BE News how the business has evolved over the years and how they plan to reach the next big milestone, of £1bn of property transacted.
Currently at the £750m mark, Prideview has come a long way since Raj and Shailesh set it up in the 1980s. Raj was born in India and raised in Tanzania and prior to entering the property industry, he bought and ran 12 pharmacies. Shailesh, meanwhile, was born in Kenya and planned to become a structural design engineer before coming to England to work for Rolls-Royce.
Entrepreneurial by nature, the brothers-in-law were well known in the 80s and 90s London commercial auction houses, where they would buy contracts, with just a 10% stake, and then swiftly sell them to other shopkeepers.
Vishal joined the family firm in 2005, two years after leaving university, having worked briefly for Nelson Bakewell, while Jesal joined a year after him. But the pair recall going to auctions with Raj and Shailesh at the ages of 16 and 17 before they had even left school.
“If they’d bought anything on the day, they would make us go around at the end of the auction and rip the catalogue page out,” says Vishal. “That would be the selling material when we got back to the office. We were just buying contracts in auctions, getting in the car and selling to people we knew such as pharmacists and doctors.”
Vishal adds: “They probably traded more properties than anyone in the country. My father and my uncle sold properties like it was a wholesale business.”
Credit crunch
By the credit crunch in 2008, the business was picking up 10 or 11 contracts every auction, most of which they were able to sell easily because they were all on 20-year leases with 15-year breaks. This was at a point in time when pharmacists and medical investors were considered pretty much recession proof. But then the banks stopped lending.
A change in strategy was required and the business pivoted from buying property to becoming agents who acted for others.
“Effectively, the agency started because we weren’t buying in the auctions,” says Vishal. “We became a brokerage business, and a successful one, acting mostly for medical investors.”
Prideview continued to deal with the auctioneers, leveraging the strong relationships it had built over the years, but it was increasingly dealing directly, an approach that went down well with clients.
“Clients valued the fact that they were seeing deals that were not available online or in a catalogue,” says Nilesh, who joined the business in 2010 having qualified as a chartered accountant and then worked at KPMG. His background made him the perfect person to build and diversify the company’s all-important database.
“I saw a lot of potential to professionalise what we’re doing,” he says. “It was a fun project to rebuild that database.”
The company didn’t just identify potential new investors, it identified potential new investments, for instance, supermarkets. “Tesco Express was taking over the high street,” remembers Nilesh. “Our thinking was: rather than trying to beat them, join them. Instead of having a newsagent next door to Tesco Express made, why not own a property let to the Tesco Express?”
Jesal adds: “We went from just buying bits and bobs for ourselves and building our portfolio on the side to completely reassessing the business. The penny dropped that we needed to do things a bit differently.”
Another Patel, Priyen, had already joined in 2008, enabling the business to diversify into property management, while Vishal and Jesal carried on growing the family portfolio. Before long, Prideview was also in the insurance business and found itself offering a full suite of property-related services.
Around 10 years ago, as Raj and Shailesh took more of a back seat, Prideview decided to start holding regular seminars to educate investors about all the services it offered. Having initially held the events in the restaurant next door, it now hosts events at venues such as the Medical Institute in central London.
As Nilesh notes, the seminars have played an important role in educating investors how to navigate what for much of the past 10 years has been a challenging market. “The point is that despite the bad news, investors know what a good investment is,” he says. “Sometimes we just have to persuade them to invest in the future.”
Many of its investors are Asian, but Prideview has also extended its reach to other communities. “We have a guy in Israel working for us to tap into some of the investors there interested in investing here,” says Vishal. “We’re definitely trying to think bigger than what we had. That’s why we’ve been building our team.”
There are now seven people on the 20-strong Prideview team involved in buying and selling – and while most are Patels, as Sejal Kamani attests, there are several others too.
Kamani (pictured centre with Eva Olah who manages the company’s insurance arm and Prideview co-founder Raj Patel), who joined just before the pandemic in January 2020, was a childhood friend of the Patels and says everyone feels as though they are part of an extended family. As physical trading ceased during the pandemic, Kamani helped the business move online and Prideview now uses five such platforms, including Rightmove and Zoopla, which have brought in an influx of new investors. “These would typically be people we would not have had any interaction with beforehand,” he says. “Having been prominent in the communities in northwest London, we have now cast our net out a lot further.”
Despite challenging market conditions, the team remain as opportunity focused as ever. Jesal says: “I think the market is quite interesting. For really good quality stock, there’s still quite a lot of demand and a lot of money. You’ve always got people who get very nervous, especially private investors, who are playing with their savings. But what we’ve seen over the last three years, as we’ve hit speed bump after speed bump, each one feeling a bit bigger, is that people are still coming in, and there is still so much money in the market.”
As well as continuing to service its clients, Prideview intends to keep building the family portfolio and is currently considering creating a separate brand for it and splitting it from the agency business. Over the past decade, people have got to know the agency side of the business, but to date, the family business has done £15m worth of transactions, so is active in its own right. The portfolio, which is focused on value-add development and asset management opportunities, is now worth £35m to £40m.
The office we are conducting the interview in is a good example. The family bought it as a pub and when the planning application submitted for a bigger scheme next door was rejected, it converted the pub into an office with 13 flats above. It now intends to keep the development in the portfolio rather than sell the flats, as initially planned. Meanwhile, it will continue to look for parades, pubs and anything where there is long-term land value or potential to build on.
New partnership
Earlier this year, Prideview also entered into a new partnership with architectural and planning practice, Cordage Group, with a view to exploring further redevelopment opportunities.
Having so many facets to the business has paid off strategically. The numbers speak for themselves. Since 2012, Nilesh estimates that the agency business has conducted approximately £750m worth of transactions across 600 deals, worth on average £1.25m each.
The business may have grown exponentially, but it remains strongly family – and community – focused. As Vishal explains: “Most of our investors are playing with their life savings, so we are very careful before we sell, because we don’t want it to come back on us. What we try and do is de-risking everything as much as we can, but there’s no crystal ball.”
It is with the community in mind that it held its annual cricket event on 18 July. Nilesh and Vishal are also UK ambassadors of a big charity in India. As with its charity interests, its business interests all have something in common.
“This all about relationships,” stresses Vishal. Kamani adds: “Personal relationships will always be core to the business.”
It’s a principle that applies internally as well as externally, and the team are now on the lookout for new recruits who will bring their own culture to the business as well as immerse themselves in Prideview’s. The business is also looking to become a full-scale, full-service provider, and expects to increase the average transaction size to £1.9m. Indeed, through its through its Tel Aviv connection, it hopes to scale up to hotel transactions in London of in excess of £50m.
National and international expansion is on the cards, too, but rather than going it alone, as it planned to prior to the pandemic, the business is now looking to team up with existing practices, citing northern England and East Africa and Southeast Asia as locations of interest.
Given the scale of its ambition, it is no surprise that it is on track to hit the £1bn transactions mark, but however much the business expands, the team are adamant they will remain focused on quality over quantity – and you only have to visit their office to know their heart will always be in Stanmore and London.
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