Erinaceous buys Entente to boost presence in Midlands

Erinaceous Group has bought Birmingham QS and project manager Entente Consulting for £7m. Under the deal, completed on 15 July, Erinaceous will pay for the company over three years.

Entente, which includes subsidiaries Francis Graves and Naismith, employs 70 staff in total, including 14 executives and directors. It made a pre-tax profit of £135,000 on a turnover of £5.3m for the 14 months to June 2004. Erinaceous said there would be no redundancies as a result of the merger.

Lucy Cummings, commercial director at Erinaceous, said the group planned to grow through a number of further acquisitions to become a “one-stop shop for all property services”.

She said taking over Entente would boost the group’s QS capabilities and gain it a foothold in the Midlands. “Our rationale for the acquisition is twofold: we gain a complimentary set of services in project management and quantity surveying and we extend into the Midlands, where until now we have had no customer base at all.”

Entente’s four directors – which include Francis Graves’ executive director Richard Graves, son of founder Francis – will run their own QS division within Erinaceous.

Dunlop Haywards, the unified property services business created by Erinaceous, recently completed the acquisition of the Manchester based surveying practice ep2.

...with further acquisitions, we want to become a one-stop shop for all property services

Lucy Cummings

Erinaceous’s turnover will be around £135m in 2005, according to Cummings.

Cummings formed Erinaceous in 1999 with chief executive Neil Bellis through the acquisition of Haywards. Since then the group has grown rapidly. Its turnover has increased from £4.3m in the year to March 2000 to £42.2m in the year to March 2004. Pre-tax profit has risen from £0.6m to £6m in the same period.

In 2004 Erinaceous bought a string of property firms: ISG Occupancy, Jordans Residential Lettings and Hercules Property Services. It floated on the Alternative Investment Market in November 2003 before switching to the London Stock Exchange in 2004.

Erinaceous splits into three arms: residential property services, contributing 43% of group turnover, commercial property services, contributing 38% and property insurance services, contributing 19%. Quantity surveying capabilities come under the umbrella of commercial property services.

Richard Graves was not available for comment.