ShoppingCentres:Two Birmingham property entrepreneurs who bought a city-centre complex for £4 million nine years ago have put it up for sale at €442 million (£300 million).
The price tag reflects the retail renaissance of the Midlands city and, more broadly, the expansion of luxury goods companies into the regions.
Alan Chatham and Mark Billingham quit salaried jobs as a developer and a surveyor to buy a cavernous former Royal Mail sorting office.
They turned it into The Mailbox, a mixed-use development that offers designer shopping to wealthy midlanders.
"When we started there wasn't a single designer store in Birmingham," said Chatham. "But there was clearly a market, with a million people here, many of them wealthy and with good taste."
The Mailbox has outlets for Harvey Nichols, Hugo Boss, Emporio Armani and Gieves & Hawkes. Since the pillar-box red building opened for business in 2000, Louis Vuitton and Selfridges have established separate outlets in Birmingham. Last week Bentley and Lamborghini launched a joint dealership at Fort Dunlop, a once-derelict tyre warehouse.
The Mailbox includes bars, restaurants, flats and offices. Its latest extension is The Cube, designed by architect Ken Shuttleworth, that will include a Conran Group restaurant.
However, the going has not always been easy: a central mall was an inhospitable wind tunnel until it was glassed in, and some outlets, such as Christian Lacroix, quit when trading was initially slow.
CBRE, the property consultant acting for the owners, values The Mailbox at €442 million (£300 million), including €147 million (£100 million) for The Cube.
Chatham and Billingham own 30 per cent each of the 25-acre complex, whose development costs were estimated at £60 million in 2000.
Chatham declined to detail how much he and Billingham might make from the sale but said: "Put it like this, we won't be able to plead poverty."
They plan to invest some of the proceeds in new schemes, probably in Birmingham.
Manchester, an earlier pioneer of upmarket shopping outside London, provokes some envy in Birmingham because of the scale of regeneration projects there. However, Chatham said: "The emphasis tends to swing back and forth (between the two cities). Birmingham is well positioned for its next round of redevelopment."
Chatham and Billingham are members of a small group of entrepreneurs who have helped transform Birmingham from a rundown post-industrial city.
Another is Gary Taylor, the boss of Argent, the business that took over the Brindleyplace offices development after the collapse of its owner, Rosehaugh.
But Manchester-based developer Tom Bloxham, the founder of Urban Splash, is having the greatest impact on Birmingham. The sharp-dressing entrepreneur, who collects the punk rock art of Jamie Reid, is refurbishing the iconic Rotunda office building and turning it into flats. A large number of the apartments have been bought by Claremont, the property investment business set up by Perm Saini, a leading Birmingham businesswoman.
Urban Splash is also behind the Fort Dunlop redevelopment. Chatham and Billingham were originally co-developers but dropped out in 2003, citing differences in working styles. That left Urban Splash to pursue a less ambitious proposal for Fort Dunlop, whose distance from the city centre meant it was regarded as a lost cause by many property professionals.
- Financial Times
