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When William Beardmore-Gray, chair of property group Knight Frank, introduces himself to his youngest cohort of employees at monthly lunches, he starts with a candid admission. “My normal first line is ‘you must think I’m a complete loser. I’ve been here for 33 years and I couldn’t find another job’.”
The affable company lifer, who has overseen the 128-year old privately owned firm since 2022, is now attempting to reshape the business from the kind of old-worldly, somewhat fusty, UK focused estate agent he joined into a bigger, dynamic company with international reach.
Knight Frank is traditionally known for being packed with posh Englishmen, with a legacy as the go-to property adviser for the British establishment. It advised Winston Churchill on the purchase of his country house, Chartwell, and handled the last open-market sale of Stonehenge in 1915 — before the monument was donated to the nation. It was once the type of business where junior employees would build fires for their seniors in their draughty, Georgian offices in London’s Hanover Square.
As it expands — the company says it has doubled in size in the UK in the past 10 years, trebled in Asia and quadrupled in the Middle East, from a smaller base — that heritage can sometimes be a burden. Knight Frank is still more commonly associated with country houses and London mansions than big commercial real estate deals, even though it already competes with listed rivals such as Savills and large US competitors CBRE and JLL in that area.
The company is also torn between old and new ways of working. It wants to retain its partnership model, a similar structure to law firms, through which top employees share profits, as this enables it to operate without taking on large amounts of debt or answering to outside shareholders — but it acknowledges this has made international growth slower and more difficult.
“We spent the last 15-20 years growing organically,” says Beardmore-Gray. “We’re currently restructuring our European business and we are spending a lot of time focusing on Asia.”
Knight Frank has increased annual revenues from around £25mn in 1989 to about £700mn in the past year, half of which was generated outside of the UK market, with a growing presence in the Middle East, India and Australia. It now directly employs 13,500 people globally and has recently advised on large deals involving international capital, such as the sale of Battersea Power Station.
But Beardmore-Gray says “the thing that [has] kept me awake at night” has been making the company more reflective of wider society. “I saw the balance and diversity in our business as a burning platform . . . We’ve got to be fishing in the entire talent pool, not just part of one.” He set out to create a business where “everyone felt they belonged”, changing company slogans and hiring diversity experts. “We couldn’t carry on being enthusiastic amateurs in this area,” he adds.
Knight Frank has appointed more women into top positions — female representation at partner level has increased from 21.7 per cent in 2021 to 27.3 per cent this year. At the lower associate level, 49.6 per cent are now women, compared with 43.3 per cent in 2021. The company is collecting broader data on the backgrounds of its workforce to “remove barriers to entry and success”.
The challenges of shaking off aspects of the past are clear: on Beardmore-Gray’s desk is a copy of Men of Property, a book written by a former partner he says was left behind by his predecessor.
Beardmore-Gray is pushing forward with the plans to modernise and expand at a difficult time for property advisory firms. Dealmaking in the commercial property sector has fallen to the lowest in more than a decade as rising interest rates and plummeting property values deter investors. That has hit fees for Knight Frank and its rivals. Savills, where transaction advisory makes up 35 per cent of global revenue, reported a 42 per cent fall in adjusted profit last year, for example. Knight Frank is yet to release its equivalent numbers.
Beardmore-Gray has one eye on UK politics and is imploring the new UK government to prioritise consistency. “Property is a complicated game. Planning, development, it’s risky and really capital intensive. What I believe our clients on that side of the business are looking for is some consistency.”
He says that as a private partnership with no debt or outside shareholders, Knight Frank is better able to weather downturns than publicly quoted rivals. But it is not immune. Despite falling fees, the company tried to avoid making job losses and initially took a hit to its profitability last year. But ultimately, it decided it needed to cut 3 per cent of its UK workforce in the autumn.
The company is suffering from “growing pains . . . trying to put a bigger sized business through the same tube in terms of the governance structure”, says Beardmore-Gray.
“You have to bring people with you,” he adds. Knight Frank “doesn’t operate well by telling people what to do. We’re not a command-and-control culture”.
Some staff have grumbled that the traditional partnership structure means they have to wait for a tap on the shoulder to move up the firm’s ranks, rather than apply for a promotion. But the company believes the prospect of joining the 83 equity partners is an attractive lure for senior staff.
Beardmore-Gray is also navigating internal conflicts among the wider workforce. He says the pandemic-driven shift towards working from home was “a brilliant thing” that gave people more control over their daily life. (He splits his time between London and Winchester; he is married with four children.) Yet it is clear where he stands personally. “We’ve put down no rules as to what people should do but if you are in a business where you are better at your job if you’re interacting with people, it’s kind of self-policing. You’ll come to the office,” he says.
As someone who comes from a large family — Beardmore-Gray is the sixth of seven children — he is used to balancing his needs with those of others. In work he ranks his priorities. “What’s best for my clients? What’s best for my team? What’s best for Knight Frank . . . And then the last question is what’s best for myself? If you ask them in that order you’ll end up in the right place.”
