One in 10 of Britain's pubs will change hands this year; with plenty of big sellers and a multitude of buyers, what makes the British pub so attractive to some and unattractive to others?
The sellers are the old British brewers conducting a second wave of disposals within a decade among the UK's 60,000 pub market, while the buyers are a new breed of independent pub firms often backed by financial institutions.
The publicly listed beer companies are selling or have sold pubs to focus on areas with greater returns such as hotels and sports clubs. Only the biggest, largely branded pubs will be retained as only they give the returns the owners demand.
For the likes of ex-brewers Bass and Whitbread, many of their smaller pubs were there to keep their old breweries busy. Last year, they both sold their breweries, so now there is no need for small pubs.
They questioned holding on to pubs that deliver annual profits at 2-3 per cent when double-digit returns could be had elsewhere. The answer was to sell a lot of pubs.
For the independent private pub groups, there is no such problem. They can borrow longterm at low rates of interest without the distraction of shareholders and the two largest, Nomura and Punch, own nearly 20 per cent of UK pubs.
The head of Nomura's principal finance group, Guy Hands, was the first to buy up leased pubs nobody seemed to want and then use the rental income from them to launch bonds and hence "securitise" their income streams.
This pushed Nomura into the lead as Britain's biggest landlord with 5,700 pubs, and others have followed such as Mr Hugh Osmond's Punch Group with 5,150.
In addition, there is no shortage of new buyers from the private equity camp with Can dover, Deutsche Bank's Morgan Grenfell Private Equity and L&G Ventures all interested in starting a pub chain.
A decade ago, the old big six British brewers were forced to sell off thousands of pubs following the 1989 Beer Orders when the UK government regarded it as anti-competitive for Allied, Bass, Courage, Whitbread, Watney and Scottish & Newcastle to own vast pub estates to sell their beer.
Now the number of big brewers has fallen, and a further pubs shake-out has been prompted by some deciding to sell their brewing side and then looking critically at why they had so many pubs.
Nomura snapped up Bass's smaller pubs, and the Japanese investment bank, Punch, Candover and Morgan Grenfell put in bids for Whitbread's pubs, with the latter currently in exclusive talks, while entrepreneur Mr Robert Breare and Pubmaster are interested in S&N's pubs and the W&D estate. Indeed, the UK trend seems to be towards either brewing beer or running pubs and not both together. Interbrew, with the old Whitbread breweries, is a standalone brewer with no pubs, and the buyer of Bass Brewers - which Interbrew is forced to sell - is also likely to be a standalone beermaker. The only major group with a foot in both camps is S&N.
But investor pressure is building for S&N to sell all its pubs to focus on international beer expansion - which it kicked off with last year's acquisition of Kronenbourg - along the lines of Interbrew, Heineken, and Anheuser-Busch.
