Judienne Wood

A six-month secondment in the lettings market turned into a 28-year career for Judienne Wood. She talks to Clare Bettelley about her role in helping transform the lettings market and its enduring appeal

Judienne Wood has made a career out of turning around lettings businesses. The Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward lettings director entered agency in 1980, as head of furnished lettings at London-based agency Marsh & Parsons. The role was born out of Wood’s legal background; she had been seconded to the agency for six months to overhaul it lettings business, but stayed eight years and has remained in agency ever since.

She says: “What I loved most of all was making money; I just got such a buzz. I got involved in setting the targets and the whole selling thing. I found a bit of a vocation.”

The property market was on the cusp of change when Wood joined Marsh & Parsons, with the London lettings scene rocketing, thanks to greater job mobility. This, together with the fact that owner-occupiers were, in response, increasingly letting out their properties in addition to investor landlords, led to the market becoming more commercial.

Wood says: “The agency didn’t really have much of a clue of how to go about business in this way. They’d ask someone to sign a tenancy agreement and that would be it. It’s a very old established firm and everything was done on a hand shake, which was typical, particularly in Kensington. Everybody knew everybody and if you agreed to do something, you did it.”

Hence the need for Wood, who is – unbelievably – 60, to overhaul Marsh & Parsons’ lettings business. She introduced independent inventory clerks, changed fee collection from monthly to quarterly and first got involved with the Association of Residential Letting Agents, of which she was later chairman.

Wood also rewrote the agency’s tenancy agreements and terms of business. “Estate agents don’t necessarily like lettings because it’s the dirty end of the business; you get people complaining when the washing machine doesn’t work,” she says.

“They don’t really want to get involved. So, I was just bought in to sort it all out.”

Marsh & Parsons doubled its lettings offices to four under Wood’s management.

While at Marsh & Parsons, Wood also decided to create a networking club for the major lettings agencies, an initiative her colleagues were convinced would be impossible to achieve because of the fact that they were competitors and therefore, it was assumed, unlikely to provide any insight into their business. The skeptics were wrong and Wood soon established a lettings industry presence in the Capital.

Rising star

Wood was headhunted to join Surrey-based Mays Rentals in 1988 to replace the outgoing area director. She had responsibility for 17 branches, which were generating over £1m in turnover at the time.

By Wood’s own admission, the job was a considerable step up from her role at Marsh & Parsons. Nevertheless, she got to work, doing what she does best: troubleshooting.

She made around 20 lettings staff redundant – 47% of the team – in her first six months. She says: “I wasn’t going to do anything major for six months but when I joined, aged 40, I realized I was one of the youngest there.

“The secretary was 76 and worked three days a week and there were different teams to write and type the inventories.”

Wood enforced redundancy for any staff member over 60 years of age and integrated two inventory teams, creating a single team for both writing and typing inventories.

She adds: “I wasn’t very popular, but while the business made £1m, it also spent it.

“The process was depressing but the results were fantastic.”

Of course, the process wasn’t helped by Wood’s daughter, who decided with a friend to pick daffodils from a neighbouring garden, which belonged to a senior staff member Wood had just made redundant.

Village life

Wood misjudged the reality of living so close to her office.

“I thought it would be a fantastic move; managerial, with the opportunity to focus on staff rather than processes, and for the first time it meant working locally,” she says.

“I thought I’d like it in a village but I didn’t. I missed the hustle and bustle [of London].”

It was a culture shock for Wood, not only in terms of working for a business where staff had time to go home for lunch, but also one that dangerously shunned the competition.

She says: “Staff split commissions between themselves but they never spoke to another agent about doing the same thing with them.”

Wood grappled with the way sleepy village life struggled to keep pace with the City.

She says: “The City girls had changed from being well-educated, with plans to have babies with their military or banker husbands, to individuals who wanted to make money. Meanwhile, Mays’ staff would get excited about their monthly glass of sherry with Mr Mays.”

The timing of Wood’s move to Mays could not have been worse; the housing market crash arrived the following year and the firm, which she claims had been one of the few making money at the time, was sold to Nationwide Anglia – now Nationwide.

“They thought they were buying a healthy business, but it turned out that they were buying a really healthy lettings business and not a very healthy sales one,” she says.

Changing times

Wood left the business in 1993 when she was headhunted by Royal & Sun Alliance to become area director at its agency business, Barnard Marcus. She says: “The Nationwide sales side was dire, so there were cut backs and at one stage they were going to cut the management layer of the lettings side of the business.

“I just thought it was time I was back in London and I thought, with Nationwide, the writing was on the wall.”

Wood says her biggest achievement at Barnard Marcus was to centralize its documentation at head office. “I took everyone who didn’t sell out the branches to maximise their selling potential and changed the terms of business and tenancy agreements and enforced an upfront fee structure.”

Wood was promoted to national sales director (residential lettings) at Royal & Sun Alliance Property Services in 1999, which was based in Southampton and involved her reviewing the sales side of the business. But a restructure of the business resulted in Wood being made redundant, which led to her moving to Hamptons International as area director in 2001, covering the City and the South. Shortly after joining the agency, Wood was contacted by a former colleague who wanted her to move to Bradford & Bingley to overhaul its lettings business.

She says: “Hamptons was a lovely company and I had planned to see my days out there – it was very much like Marsh & Parsons but a lot more grown up in terms of its procedures and incentives, such as a pension scheme. “But this colleague kept on at me and I thought this is it; this is the top job in the country.”

Wood moved to B&B in 2002, only to be faced with the recurring trend of her career two years later – the role changed. B&B sold its agency business to Countrywide for £44m, leaving Wood to mull her next move.

“I was never going to work for Countrywide; I’d done the corporate thing.”

So she called Lee Watts, founder and managing director of London agency Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward, who she had heard was looking for a lettings director, only to be told she was 48 hours too late and the role had just been offered to somebody else. Luckily, a backup plan was unnecessary as Watts called back two days later, explaining that talks had broken down with the applicant in question and that he wanted to meet with Wood. She joined in October 2004 and was made a main board director after just 18 months.

She says: “I’ve been totally focused on the sales side on the business this time and focused on the way the job is done and the incentives paid.” She changed negotiators’ pay to basic salary plus a percentage of income to basic plus 10% of the commission they generate as of last year.

“This stopped people carrying others and helped us retain good staff.”

She also forced staff to focus on the performance of the business on a monthly, rather than quarterly basis, to enable her to identify any underperforming staff more quickly and act accordingly.

Learning curve

Wood says the biggest learning curve of her career has been in people management.

“At Marsh & Parsons it was a very gentle lifestyle and everyone was frightfully nice but in a big organization you can’t carry anybody.

“At Mays I learnt to listen better to everyone. And I also learnt that what works in one place won’t necessarily work in another.”

And, ironically, as much as she has helped professionalise the lettings business, Wood laments the death of the old, less structured days.

“Lettings had only really started gathering momentum as a business in its own right, rather than as the poor cousin of property sales, when I joined in the early 1980s.

“It was quite a burgeoning industry; it was new and different. I remember one Saturday going in to work to move a piano up Kensington Church Street because the landlord forgot to take it out of their property. Now you get the removal people in.

“There just wasn’t the formulation then; you did everything yourself.

“We had a lot of fun.”

Nevertheless, now firmly back in the Capital and working in the gentrified environment that she is so obviously most comfortable with, together with the fact that the lettings business is now booming, it’s difficult to imagine Wood departing the industry anytime soon.

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