Jamie Lewis is proud of his Leicester heritage and over the years he has done plenty to show it. Business Editor Tom Pegden spoke to him about plans for his property empire
Jamie Lewis is the definition of a self-made man, building up a multi-million pound property empire and in the process stamping his mark on the city landscape. His is one of several businesses in recent years to exploit growing demand from Leicester students for high quality accommodation with every conceivable mod-con. Right now he is awaiting the outcome of a planning appeal into a proposed 15 million investment which could see 279 flats built next to his existing huge CODE scheme along the River Soar in Western Road.
He already has three blocks there, providing hundreds of students with all the comforts of home as well as much more in the form of a games room, cafe, gym and cinema room. Jamie describes it as being like buying a “BMW for the price of a VW”. He has invested more than 70 million in regeneration schemes in the city in the past five years and now he has his sights on other cities, ripe for development.
In fact, he plans to spend 50 million on his next big project at the other end of the M69, plus another 50 million on an executive residential scheme back in his home city.
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And it’s all down to a 44-year-old, who grew up on Leicester’s Goodwood estate and as a young lad worked in his dad’s car dealership bypassing university on the way. It was then that Jamie launched his first business. He had the bright idea of working with councils to sell illuminated adverts on benches just like bus shelter ads.
It was called Lewis Bench Advertising. He said: “We signed up Leicester, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, but I just couldn’t sign up London and without London we couldn’t seal a national package.
“We were a relatively big business based out of a tiny office in Humberstone Road, with these major contracts with local authorities to provide thousands of benches with advertising.
“But we just could not get Transport for London.
“The Leicester West MP at the time was Patricia Hewitt and even she was trying to lobby Ken Livingstone but couldn’t persuade him.”
Despite investing 10 years of his life through the 1990s in the project, it went under. Jamie said: “That first business was a big part of my life, but not something I would go back to. A lot of energy went into it. I can remember working one Christmas Day, coming down to the office, writing letters to councils that I was chasing.
“I was working with my dad at the same time, buying and selling cars to subsidise the business, but had also started a property business.
“There came a time in 2000 when I bought a portfolio of about 30-odd properties and realised that I needed to focus my time on what was profitable.”
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So he directed his efforts to buying tired, Victorian villas around Leicester’s Fosse Road Central. He said: “We would take them back to the brickwork and create six modern, clean, smaller flats.
“It was fortunate that the property market moved on during this time and values went up, so that allowed me to borrow against them.
“We just continued to buy the same style of property, generally larger villas that we stripped back, making maximum use of the floor space. We built up a good team of tradespeople.”
The move into new-build followed the purchase of a pair of listed villas in Glenfield Road which he was able to renovate and add a new block at the back of them. That was only 2009, and in the short number of years since, Jamie Lewis Residential has grown to around 500 units in the city.
At the same time, people like Unite and Opal were providing new-build student accommodation, usually for first years. Jamie came up with the idea of high quality accommodation , but for established students, accustomed to a comfortable family life and not content with anything shoddy. He said: “It’s more of an alternative to shared housing and that’s where the market has really changed.
“You just have to think of some of the issues with sharing a student house late night noise and parties, unkempt gardens, ‘to let’ boards everywhere and deserted streets over the summer.”
Around that time the old Equity Shoes factory came onto the market in Western Road parallel to Narborough Road and five minutes walk from De Montfort University. Jamie’s team needed to start from scratch and ended up buying out neighbours to ensure three phases of building could be completed on three acres of land.
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He said: “The difficult part was getting planning consent, but when you think what we’ve built here nobody could argue that it’s not a massive improvement.
“The scheme won a ProCon award for regeneration the year before last.”
Work got under way and everything looked fine until a bombshell in the form of main contractor Hallam Contracts, of Oadby, going bust. Jamie said: “They went into liquidation half way through the build.
“They were a great Leicestershire company, and we found ourselves having to find another contractor.
“Because we build student developments we are always constrained by getting everything done for students moving in September.
“If you miss that, you are left with a lot of very unhappy mums and dads and students.
“So we had nine months to build 460 rooms and no builder.
“We could abandon all the work for a year or move quickly to find someone else. Luckily, we managed to get it done in time.”
Around the same time, Jamie’s company was building another set of student flats just around the corner, alongside the Great Central Way in Upperton Road. He also took on the handsome old railway shed next door. After a brief battle with the city council, he was able knock down a slice of the Victorian shed to create parking for the flats and a Lidl and eventually allow a gym.
bike shop and coffee shop to move in. A decision was made to sell the 550-flat Upperton Road development last year to New York and Chinese investors and concentrate on managing the Western Road blocks.
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The sale brought in a tidy 40 million, said Jamie. The search is now on for sites in other cities, which has proved quite a task.
He said: “What we do is slightly different to everyone else.
“We only focus on big schemes where we provide those ancillary facilities.
“You can’t have 24-hour security if you only have 120 bedrooms, or a cafe or 50 piece gym it’s not economical.
“There are teams of people cleaning non-stop.
“You have to find a large site in a key location.
“One we are about to start on is in Coventry, right next to the university, with 1,050 beds which we will be spending 50 million on.
“We would hope to get on site in March and it will be an 18-month build.
“We’ve got other cities we are looking at like Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham.”
Jamie is still heavily involved in the private sector rental market, with plans for a two-acre brownfield site next to Friars Mill on the banks of the Soar to the north of the city. He said: “We bought that site five years ago, and are putting in for a 50 million scheme with 500 units.
“What the mayor has done has clearly
assisted regeneration of the city’s waterside by investing in the Friars Mill business complex. It’s fabulous.
“In terms of our own regeneration, we had 1,200 people working on the Code, and the vast majority were local people.
“The window firms, plasterers, electricians were all Leicester-based.
“We are a big contributor to the construction industry.”
Jamie said the project next to Friars Mill would meet a growing demand for a new type of inner city housing smart apartments for young executives with high disposable incomes. Right now he is looking for an institutional investor to back the scheme. If it goes ahead, it will be a further example of the part Jamie Lewis has played in the city’s regeneration and another element of the changing shape of Leicester.