FOUR years ago Tim Allan, as director in Edinburgh of UBS, was managing other people's wealth after working in Mayfair for the Citygroup Private Bank and spending two years as equerry to the Duke of York.
He had graduated as an MA in History from St Andrews, attended RMA Sandhurst, served in the Army across the world and retired from the army in 1998 as a major.
He established an Edinburgh office for Citigroup in 2000 and three years later UBS won
him over.
He says: "I was working in the private wealth business but it was not satisfying me. It was not entrepreneurial and I was looking for something else. Then Steven Garry and Peter Hookham came to me and said there was a good opportunity in Dundee."
That was it. The three formed the Unicorn Property Group to buy from Forth Ports for £14.5 million a large chunk of the Dundee waterfront.
Unicorn now has assets worth more than £60 million, numerous projects in various parts of Scotland and has quickly established itself as one of Scotland's emerging property companies.
Tim and his colleagues saw the purchase of Dundee's City Quay – the land around the Victoria and Camperdown Docks – as being ripe with opportunities and this has given him the entrepreneurial buzz he had been missing.
Unicorn has now built and sold three phases of a housing development and a retail park, has more houses under way and in what it calls Dundee One has the largest speculative development in Dundee in a generation with 100,000sq ft of offices on the banks of the Tay.
Tim at the outset encouraged Alasdair Locke, chairman of the Abbot Oil in Aberdeen, to invest in the fledging Unicorn and he brought with him his entrepreneurial flair and his enthusiasm for investing in good managers who build strong companies.
Not surprisingly Tim is an enthusiastic ambassador for Dundee. He states: "Dundee as a city has endured a lot of neglect over the years and throughout the Eighties was a byword for failure. That is not the case any more. It is buzzing and exciting. The Dundee I knew in 2000 and the Dundee I know now are poles apart."
He says that among the three founders of Unicorn there is no supremo.
"The three of us make decisions – two to one will win."
One of the many decisions was to snap up a gap site in the Royal Mile and last year in a joint venture it paid £50 million for 47 petrol stations throughout the UK.
It is not short of ambition in what at the moment is a tricky property market and when funding is the big issue Allan is happy to say: "The Allied Irish Bank have been outstanding in their support and have not wavered at all."
Tim is a property entrepreneur who claims he knows very little about property. He states: "I am not from a property background – I came from the Army.
"There are plenty of good people out there who know more than I do about property – you have to seek them out, listen to what they say and make a decision. But you also have to use your gut instinct and common sense."
Tim lives near Dollar with his Zimbabwean wife Kim whom he met at university. They own a farm. and have two young daughters and what he calls a menagerie of animals which includes horses, goats, dogs, chickens, ducks and a guinea pig.
Rent-free carrots are key to major dealsDETAILS of the major Edinburgh office deal – announced last week – in which accountancy and professional services firm Scott-Moncrieff signed a 15-year lease for three floors totalling 17,700sq ft at the Scottish Widows Investment Partnership Exchange Place development say a lot about the state of the Edinburgh market. It is believed that Scott-Moncrieff is paying a rent close to what agents had apparently been targeting – £26 a sq ft – but is has also been learned that such was the determination to get them over the door that Scott-Moncrieff will not be paying any rent for the first 30 months. Eric Young & Co acted for Scott-Moncrieff and, to facilitate the deal, it re-structured the lease arrangement to enable Scott-Moncrieff to move out of three townhouses in Melville Street.
THERE was also a rent-free sweetener – believed to be 18 months – in the deal by BAM Construct UK for a ten-year lease at a rental of around £16 a sq ft of 5,939sq ft at the refurbished Currie House in Pentland Gait Office Park in West Edinburgh, which is now 40 per cent let. Knight Frank acted for BAM with James Barr for the landlord, a private investor.
CB RICHARD Ells (Scotland) has moved into larger premises in Queens Terrace, Aberdeen, taking 2,660sq ft on a lease assignment at £46,550 a year which works out at £17.50 a sq ft. CBRE was self-represented, with Young & Co for the landlord, Nationwide.
THE Glasgow office of Graham & Sibbald has sold a portfolio of 23 licensed trade outlets in the north-west of England. It was acting on instructions from the Bank of Scotland and Price Waterhouse Coopers, the latter called in when the former owners of the properties, the Liverpool-based Cains Beer Company, went into administration. The portfolio – at an asking price of £11 million – was acquired by the Blackpool-based Amber Taverns.
FASHION boutique Goodstead, which already has premises in Bread Street, Edinburgh, has opened a new store at Hanover Buildings, Rose Street in a ten-year deal with landlord British Oversees Bank Nominees to take a 994sq ft unit at £49,000 a year with nine months rent-free. Jones Lang LaSalle, who represented Goodstead, says the deal shows that the demand for young fashion remains strong.
• Send deals details to jimdow@lumison.co.uk
