Urbanbubble sets out ambitious growth plan
Manchester-based residential property management company Urbanbubble said it saw a 62% rise in turnover to £1.7m in the year to the end of March 2015 and operating profit increased to £213,000 from £110,000 in 2014.
The results are underpinned by an organic pipeline of new instructions which averaged 400 new homes a quarter between 2012 and 2014. The company manages more than 6,000 homes, occupied by 8,500 residents, across 90 developments in Manchester and Salford.
In 2014 Urbanbubble strengthened its team by 12 bringing the number of full time employees to 57, and this year the firm is expected to make four senior management appointments.
Michael Howard, managing director, said: “Since I started Urbanbubble in 2008, we’ve always had strong annual growth but to achieve 50% increase in our turnover from £1m base is really pleasing and is testament to the hard work put in by the whole team at Urbanbubble.
“The talk of the town is all about the tens of thousands of apartments to be built in the coming years, which will happen and many will be PRS. So little new stock has been built in the past years and most of our growth has come from established developments where the residents wanted better management and maintenance from their building managers. We’re preparing now to be ready to take on much, much more as new developments complete in the coming years.
“Those preparations include a major investment into bespoke software and technology to create a whole new property management system which everyone at Urbanbubble will use. We’ve also been working behind the scenes with the firms and organisations that will deliver many of the PRS developments in Manchester – we are all going on the same journey together.
“We’re moving into a larger office in the autumn which will start a new chapter of growth for us. We will expand the new business team and set ourselves the target of achieving 500 to 700 new homes a quarter, split between new developments and established schemes.
“We will be launching our new sales and lettings division before the end of the year and we hope to be able to make an announcement about our first appointment to manage a PRS scheme very soon.
“We expect to hit turnover of £2.5m by March 2016 and double profits. As new developments complete and become occupied we expect revenue to climb to £7m within the next three years, and we expect to double the work force in the next 18 months.”
