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Optivo sees turnover fall as market sales end
Large London housing association Optivo has seen a fall in turnover after it stopped building homes for open market sale, it has revealed.
In an update to the stock market ahead of its accounts for the financial year 2018/19, Optivo said it made a turnover of £314m, a slight decrease on the figure for the previous financial year of £317m.
It said in the update: “The decrease in turnover was in large part a result of no open market sales during 2018/19 as there were no completions of properties for the open market sales tenure.”
This meant it made no turnover on this kind of property, whereas in the previous financial year it made £12.5m.
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Last month, Paul Hackett, chief executive of Optivo, told Inside Housing that after rethinking the association’s development strategy, it had re-allocated its planned market sale homes to affordable housing.
Inside Housing’s Biggest Builders Survey from last year revealed that the 44,000-home organisation started work on no homes for market sale in 2017/18.
Optivo’s stock market update also revealed that its surplus before tax fell slightly in the last financial year from £90m to £89m.
On the development side, Optivo said that on 31 March it was in contract to deliver 2,020 homes, with remaining capital commitments of £361m. Both of these figures have remain roughly steady since last year, when they were 2,054 and £363m, respectively.
As other housing associations have reported, it also had an increased number of unsold shared ownership homes, which rose from 65 to 262. It said this partly reflected “a relatively large number of shared ownership completions”.
The update also said that at the end of the financial year, Optivo had available undrawn debt of £380m, down from £606m at the same time in the previous year.
Update: at 9.44 on 20.5.19 This story was updated to correct the numbers of unsold shared ownership homes.
