Housing 21 agrees terms for home care company

The sheltered housing provider made an offer of 39 pence per share for Claimar Care on 28 August, valuing the domiciliary care firm at £19.5 million.

Shareholders controlling 54.4 per cent of Claimar’s existing shares have already made irrevocable undertakings to accept the offer.

Andrew Cowan, chief executive of law firm Devonshires, said: ‘This deal will be of particular interest to the larger associations, who for some while have been looking at undervalued businesses which could add value to their organisations.

Associations might buy public companies ranging from firms like Claimar to ‘developers with land banks,’ he added.

Housing 21 provides 30,000 hours a week of council-funded domiciliary care. It calculates that buying Claimar would raise this to 80,000 hours a week, making Housing 21 one of the UK’s top five providers. 

Pushpa Raguvaran, deputy chief executive of Housing 21, said it needed three quarters of the shares to de-list Claimar from the alternative investment market. With 90 per cent or more, it could force the remaining shareholders to sell.

She said that while Housing 21 was consolidating its takeover of Claimar it was ‘highly unlikely that we will get into other acquisitions,’ but that it was ‘not ruled out’.

The takeover bid comes at the end of a difficult period for Claimar.

Last June it issued a profits warning, citing delays on contract deals and a struggle to pass on increased costs to its local authority clients.

In December, it was forced to renegotiate a bank loan to avoid covenant breach.

Housing 21’s offer values Claimar’s shares 212 per cent higher than their price on 6 August this year, the day before the takeover plans were made public.

Ms Raguvaran said: ‘[Claimar] has grown very fast, mainly through acquisitions, and a key problem for them is they haven’t really consolidated and integrated those acquisitions. We won’t want to make that mistake.’

Housing 21 plans to run Claimar as a self-contained subsidiary for six months while it assesses how best to integrate the firm into its business.

Asked whether the takeover would prompt redundancies, she said: ‘We don’t expect huge reductions in staff because we expect to grow the business.’

A spokesperson for the Tenant Services Authority said: ‘As far as we are aware this would be the first time a public listed company has been bought by a housing association.’

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