He bought his first company in his early twenties and now has a wide range of property interests. And there’s one Shoreditch venue where Nicholas Cowell gets to mix business with pleasure
If you’re in Cannes next year for the annual MIPIM property show, you may see investor Nicholas Cowell riding into town on his BMW GS.
In fact, there could be a whole gang of motorcyclists along for the ride.
“MIPIM watch out. A lot of people in the property industry are passionate about motorcycles,” laughs the 57-year-old, who has just spent the weekend taking part in the London leg of the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride – a global “celebration of the art of being dapper and classic custom motorcycles”, which has also raised millions for charity.
Sitting in a perfectly worn vintage leather armchair in a Shoreditch bar, the property entrepreneur – brother to music mogul Simon – could not look more at home. And so he should. The venue is The Bike Shed, a chic hangout artfully inserted into railway arches at 384 Old Street, EC1, which Cowell was instrumental in getting off the ground in 2015, making the original investment with TV presenter and bike enthusiast Charley Boorman. Actor and film producer Tom Hardy is among those to have come on board as an investor more recently.
“I’m a passionate motorcyclist. It’s nice to have a passion outside property and I always wanted a place in town for motorcyclists to come to,” says Cowell, whose personal collection also includes a Harley-Davidson.
The Bike Shed is the brainchild of Anthony van Someren – better known as Dutch – and his wife, Vikki, a media and events duo who tapped into the emerging scene for custom-built bikes from around 2012-13 with a hugely popular blog and, later, pop-up events. Forget sports bikes, we’re talking about custom bikes that hark back to the “bobbers” of the 1920s or the café racers of the 1960s.
“I was so impressed with what Dutch and Vikki were doing that I helped fund and raise the capital to make this place happen,” says Cowell. The team is now looking to open its next venue in Los Angeles. “There’s nothing quite like it in LA. Bikers are largely unrepresented in the US,” he explains.
Festival future
Also on the cards is a full-blown festival, after The Bike Club held its first Café Racer Cup event this summer at Lydden Hill, near Canterbury, in Kent.
The Shoreditch venue is a vast 12,000 sq ft beneath four redeveloped railway arches, offering not only a 100-seat bar and restaurant but also a barber shop and a retail space. The Bike Shed sells its own clothing range and merchandise in store and online, something that is seen as a key part of the business model.
Bikes for sale are dotted seductively around the place, too. The venue has a 30m private road and on-site parking for up to 60 bikes. Arches three and four are available for private hire.
At 6pm on a Tuesday, the bar and restaurant are already filling up with clientele of all styles and ages – non-bikers are very much welcome – and the separate hire space is being cleaned up after a corporate event.
The Bike Shed took over the Railtrack-owned site from five-a-side football pitch operator Powerleague, owned by Patron Capital, whom Cowell already knew. Indeed, while motorbikes are Cowell’s “other” passion, his property expertise is clearly at play here.
Cowell’s main property vehicle is The Cowell Group, a collection of property companies which he runs with co-founder Adrian Levy, trading, developing and investing in a diverse range of residential and commercial property but predominantly in central London.
“It’s mainly our holdings alone,” he says, although they do sometimes work in joint venture.
The pair, based in Maida Vale, north-west London, have worked together for 35 years and only last year pulled away from their original business, niche investment and development agency The Estate Office, which they founded in 1983.
Directors Chaim Aziz and Daniel Minsky led a management buyout and will continue its business in residential and commercial property services.
“I remain very close to it as a company and remain very proud of it,” says Cowell. “They’re selling £400m-£600m of property a year.”
Meanwhile, Cowell and Levy are busy developing a block of 15 flats in Compayne Gardens, in South Hampstead, North West London.
“It’s fascinating how you can carve up a building and create interesting spaces with galleries and mezzanines. I still get really excited about going on site. I haven’t been for a week and I’ve missed it,” Cowell says.
Income focus
In the current climate their primary focus is on income, so the block will be kept as a rental investment rather than trying to sell the units into a falling market.
Other projects in progress include two large houses in Hampstead, which they plan to develop either as 18 flats or as houses, again to keep. And they recently bought a portfolio of London HMOs off-market for £20m. The latter are high income-producing assets. “They’re not in the most salubrious areas, but at the moment we’re looking away from prime because it’s over-valued,” he says.
Cowell admits the current market is incredibly tough. “We’ve worked through the big recessions. We know how to navigate through challenging markets and undoubtedly this is one of the most challenging of all time because no one knows where it’s going,” he says.
His answer is to focus solely on opportunities where the group can add value – through asset management, planning or change of use.
“The common denominator is a good property play,” he says. “It could be a hotel, a block of flats, a site.”
Cowell is well known for buying distressed assets and still goes to the auction rooms he frequented early in his career where he brushed shoulders with prolific traders such as the billionaire Pears family.
He went on to form a successful 50/50 joint venture company with the Pears family called Belsize Estates, which bought millions of pounds worth of property. The jv sold all the assets before the last property crash to qualify for entrepreneur tax relief.
“I take the view that you never really know where your next deal will come from,” says Cowell, recalling one portfolio of distressed assets he bought as a result of a conversation with a fellow guest at a wedding.
Cowell says he has done very well over the years from “shops and uppers” and pubs and he continues to look for those types of deals. He has, however, steered clear of permitted development opportunities to convert office blocks to flats.
“We think there’s more value in keeping them as offices,” he explains. “If you’ve got the right building, it’s great. But if you convert a horrible office building to flats then you end up with flats in a horrible office building.”
He prefers to pull regeneration sites together and then step away at the point of planning.
“We’ll trade anything,” he says. “We know what it costs us to run our business. If you’re not covering that, then you’re going backwards.”
The group, which employs a full-time architect, accountant and site-finders, typically has around half a dozen projects in progress at any time. At the moment that includes working in a joint venture to pull a site together for more than 1,000 homes, with their role very much that of “putting the deals together”.
Acting on instinct
Cowell describes himself as a “bit dyslexic” and vows that he can’t read a spreadsheet. “When I see something I like, I trust my good instinct. I also trust it not to do things.”
He keeps bank gearing low and says HSBC is “incredibly supportive” to his business.
“The only time I’ve been involved in high gearing was with a property fund that went bust,” he says. That fund, which went into administration in 2008, was managed by celebrity-backed property manager aAim Group. “It was a lesson learnt,” he says.
He is far more comfortable investing his own money and he’s raring to go.
“The bottom line is that we’ve amassed a substantial war chest as there are going to be opportunities,” he says.
“We’re not really a seller at the moment. We’re being offered a lot of completed blocks [of flats]. It’s no secret what’s going on. We’re definitely in a buyer’s market and looking actively for the right opportunities to buy.
“It’s going to be interesting: investors with highly geared portfolios are not going to be able to refinance and if they look at their portfolios, they are not going to be able to sell quickly without a discount to market value.
“It happened in 2008-09. The banks have been more cautious over the past 10 years, which has helped things. But I think there are always reckless people out there and market conditions change very quickly.”
Cowell’s next challenge might be trying to find enough time to ride his favourite bike as the deals roll in.
From office boy to property entrepreneur
Nicholas Cowell was born in March 1961, 18 months after Simon. They grew up in Elstree, Hertfordshire, where the family’s neighbours included Joan Collins.
His mother, Julie, was a dancer and father, Eric, was on the board of directors at EMI, where he worked on the property side of the record business.
Nicholas left school at 16 and his father helped him into his first office job, at estate agency Garrard, Smith & Partners.
In 1983, Nicholas and friend Adrian Levy bought the business, reinventing it as The Estate Office. The pair also invested in property in their own right and in joint ventures and began to build up what would become The Cowell Group of companies.
They have survived two property downturns relatively unscathed and worked with some major overseas investors along the way.
Deal highlights have included: acquiring with clients St John’s Wood High Street, NW8, in 2011, for £39m; and acquiring a site in St John’s Wood and developing more than 75,000 sq ft of new-build residential in 2015.
They sold The Estate Office as part of a management buyout last year.
To send feedback, e-mail julia.cahill@egi.co.uk or tweet @EGJuliaC or @estatesgazette
■ This article appears in the November edition of EG’s Property Auction Buyers’ Guide, out on 24 November
