Back
News

Winning tradition

Long and winding road Mason Owen & Partners’ senior partner Barry Owen celebrates 40 years in business. Hetalks to David Quinn about the company’s highs and lows.

For someone who has spent decades in charge of one of the North West’s most well-known firms of surveyors, it is a minor miracle that Barry Owen has so far avoided speaking to the press. “I don’t like to give interviews,” he says. “I’d rather advertise the properties than myself.”


But Liverpool-based Mason Owen & Partners is 40 this year and, by way of celebration, the senior partner has invited EG in for a chat. It is the week after the firm won its third consecutive EG Award for best North West agent, and Owen seems pleased.


He describes Mason Owen as a “traditional, professional firm of chartered surveyors”, although his office has something of the eccentricity of Hogwarts about it. Dozens of artworks from Owen’s personal collection line the walls – “My wife won’t let me put them up at home,” he says – while models of ships and trams, a stuffed pheasant and other assorted curios fill the hallways.


The latest EG Award is conspicuously absent from the firm’s first-floor board room, though. “I took it home to show my wife and left it there,” says Owen, by way of explanation.


Mason Owen remains one of the North West’s largest independent practices, despite “plenty of approaches” from suitors over the past four decades. “I run the business as an old-fashioned, family sort of business,” says Owen. “I’m a firm believer in having no outside shareholders because they aren’t always conducive to giving the best advice. If we feel we’re right we say so, even if the advice is negative. We don’t have anyone pushing us to do more business.”


Solid profits


This no-nonsense approach has served the firm well, allowing it to build up an enviable client roster and deliver solid profits of £2m on a turnover of £10.1m in the year to 30 June.


Rewind 40 years, and the origins of the company hint at an atypical bit of entrepreneurial zeal in the height of the 1960s “flower power” era. Back in 1967, Liverpool was one of the cool capitals of the world, thanks largely to The Beatles. As the band released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that year, Owen and Geoffrey Mason, his colleague at Bernard Thorpe & Partners, decided it was time for a young, “pushy” firm of agents to open – and Mason Owen was born.


Both men were from the Wirral and decided to make Liverpool their base. While being home to the Fab Four, the city was then perhaps not the ideal base from which to start a professional services business – especially if one wanted to be a hit in the national market. But a remarkable slice of fortune came Mason Owen’s way almost immediately when it landed an instruction to sell 77 shops on behalf of greengrocer chain Waterworths.


“It was certainly a flying start, but we couldn’t afford to pay for the boards at first,” says Owen. “Because Waterworths had shops across the region and in North Wales, it took us outside Liverpool a bit.”


The Waterworths’ instruction was a template for Mason Owen’s future success. The firm quickly secured instructions from retail occupiers, including Kwik Save, Iceland, Greggs and, later, MFI. Ethel Austin – which would later spawn a property business with which Owen became closely involved – was another key client (see panel).


“The firm’s platform was the growth of these retailers,” says Owen. “They needed 24-hour attention, and our ethos wasn’t about making promises but about delivery – and we delivered.”


Agency connection


From a standing start, Mason Owen was quickly acquiring hundreds of shops for national retail chains. And, through the agency connection, the firm was able to secure profitable valuation work.


It expanded into offshoot offices during the 1970s, but its home remained in Liverpool. Today, it employs 110 staff at its office in the city, compared with a combined total of fewer than 10 in London and Edinburgh, as well as 25 at Mason Owen Lyons in Dublin.


Liverpool during the 1970s and 1980s was not, of course, an especially fun place to be, thanks to industrial decline and social and political unrest. Owen remembers it vividly.


“People in London thought of Liverpool as a wasteland at the time, and always used to ask if we were OK,” he says. “During the mid 1970s, the city was in bad shape and things were very, very difficult. There was no investment whatsoever – no transactions – but gradually retailers came back hungry for more.”


In the years after the low point of 1981’s Toxteth riots, Marks & Spencer, Woolworths and shoe retailer Clarks gave Mason Owen work. During the 1980s, the firm won instructions to become letting agent for two of the decade’s largest shopping centres, Merry Hill in the West Midlands and Meadowhall near Sheffield.


The company has built up a sizeable valuations business and manages £1bn of property investments. It also has one of the most active office agency teams in Liverpool.


On the back of widespread national recognition, Owen admits there were “temptations” to move to London but, ultimately, the firm was “very firmly rooted” in Liverpool because of its staff.


“Liverpool is actually very well placed geographically,” he says. “Access wasn’t a problem. In a funny way, we are at the centre of the British Isles.”


Owen points out that, although several of Mason Owen’s personnel have been with the firm for 30 years or more, one notable staff member who did leave was Geoff Mason, 14 years ago. According to Owen, the split with his co-founder was because of “family reasons”. He will not elaborate further, other than to say it was “a sad time for the firm”, and that Mason was a “great contributor” to Mason Owen’s success.


EG reported on 8 May 1993 that Mason took his sons – Andrew, a salaried partner, and Christopher, a negotiator – with him to form a new company, Mason & Partners. The firm now trades from Liverpool and London, has 37 staff, and counts Peacocks and Superdrug among its clients.


Owen, meanwhile, celebrated his 65th birthday in April and, although his art collection includes works by LS Lowry, he has no plans to tend to it full-time by retiring.


He lives in Great Barrow, outside Chester, where he is a church warden, reasoning that “every village should have one”. He also enjoys golf and, in a personal capacity, advised the Royal Liverpool Golf Club on the necessary land assembly to allow it to host the 2006 Open Championship at Hoylake.


Owen describes his involvement in property for more than 40 years as a “privilege” and says: “I can’t remember a dull day.”


This continued enthusiasm for life and work is perhaps down to his successful recovery from a serious illness in 1998. Owen was told not to work again, but preferred instead to return to the business – and has not looked back.


“I’ll never retire,” he says, cheerfully. “I’m aiming to do 50 years – then we’ll see.”


CV


Born Macclesfield, Cheshire, April 1942


1963 Junior partner, Bernard Thorpe & Partners


1967 Establishes Mason Owen with Geoff Mason. Holds position of senior partner


Lifestyle Lives in Great Barrow, Cheshire. Married with six children and 10 grandchildren. Hobbies include golf, cricket, rugby, shooting, art and vintage cars


Ethel Austin profits from Owen input


As well as his day job as senior partner at Mason Owen, Barry Owen is both a major shareholder and a director of Ethel Austin Properties.


After meeting founder Ronald Austin in the 1960s, Mason Owen acquired an eventual 300 shops for Ethel Austin’s retail operation. Owen, a self-proclaimed “fan of property”, began advising Austin in the 1970s that freehold investment may prove profitable, and properties were soon built up into a portfolio.


Austin died in 2000, but today, Ethel Austin Properties, which is separate from the retail company, owns 1,000 properties domestically and overseas, with £665m in gross assets across 200 associated businesses.


The company’s development portfolio is valued at £400m. Schemes include the £30m West Tower in Liverpool, a joint venture with Beetham, as well as the £100m Sefton Street Quarter, a jv with Vermont Developments.

Up next…