INTERVIEW PAUL JONES
I n 2009, Paul Jones was staring down the tail end of a global financial crisis and an uncertain future in commercial construction. Today, he runs Kingswood Homes (UK) Ltd, a growing housebuilding company in Lancashire on track to build 175 homes a year. His story isn’t just a tale of growth – it’s a blueprint for any builder wondering how to scale up from one-off projects to something bigger. “I trained as a Quantity Surveyor and worked for Davis Langdon Everest in Liverpool while doing my degree part-time,” says Jones. “Eventually, I moved into project management with a commercial developer. Around 2006, I saw a gap in the market for small-scale office fit-outs, so a friend and I started a company to do just that.” Then the 2008 financial crash hit, and the commercial market evaporated almost overnight. “There wasn’t enough demand to sustain that kind of work. We had to pivot quickly, and residential seemed like a natural progression. We began doing extensions and one-off houses – just trying to keep things ticking over.” Jones’ big break came not long after, when he bought a run-down building and secured planning permission for four houses. “I went to the bank for funding, and they turned me down. But I managed to find a private investor who backed the project. By the end of 2009, we’d completed our first Kingswood Homes development.” What came next was unexpected but defining. “Our accountant pointed out that we’d made more profit from those four houses than in the previous three years of fit-out work combined. That was the lightbulb moment. From then on, we knew where we needed to focus.”
APIVOTAL How Paul Jones turned a career shift into a thriving housebuilding business
transformed the business. “Their financial model was much more flexible than what traditional banks offered. Instead of having to put down 50 per cent upfront, we only needed 20 per cent. They’d then provide 40 per cent at the outset, and the remaining 40 per cent would come from house sales,” says Jones. “That structure allowed us to grow far more quickly than we could have otherwise.” By 2013, Kingswood made the strategic decision to stop contracting altogether and
For the next few years, Kingswood balanced contracting work with residential development, using the former to cover overheads while slowly building up a portfolio of housing projects. “We worked on all sorts – converted churches, pubs, nurseries, even a redundant primary school in the Lake District,” Jones explains. Eventually, the company’s growing track record enticed Barclays to fund future projects. This helped accelerate growth, but it was Homes England that really
Master Builder 28
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