Savills chief's pay jumps by 33% ahead of expansion push

Jeremy Helsby, chief executive of the property adviser Savills, has seen his pay jump 33 per cent after launching the biggest expansion programme in the company's history.

Mr Helsby received £2.2m in 2014, according to the company's annual report which was published on Tuesday. The extra money came from a profit-sharing arrangement which paid out £1.9m, up from £1.5m the previous year.

The company's turnover grew 19 per cent in 2014 to top £1bn for the first time, while pre-tax profits rose 21 per cent to £84.7m.

Part of the increase in turnover came from Savills' acquisition of the US property services company Studley last year.

This was the group's first step into the American market since an abortive attempt to take the property brand stateside in the late 1980s, a move in which Mr Helsby was involved while still a junior member of the company, for which he has worked for more than 30 years.

Best known for its tweedy, upper-crust English image, Savills is scaling up to take on the world's largest property advisory firms, the US-based CBRE and JLL.

The company cited the Studley acquisition and further expansion in Asia and the Cordea Savills investment platform as reasons for Mr Helsby's pay award. He received the maximum pay award possible, the annual report said.

For Simon Shaw, the chief finance officer, pay grew 13 per cent to £1.7m; £1.5m of that came from the profit share. Mr Shaw was also credited in the annual report for his role in Savills' expansion programme.

Mr Helsby also received an extra £50,000 in his annual base salary from January 2015 onwards, taking it to £275,000. Mr Shaw received an increase of £35,000, taking his base pay to £210,000.

The remuneration committee's report said it was "mindful of the group's philosophy to place greater emphasis on variable, performance-related remuneration, whilst recognising that base salaries for the executive directors had not been increased for at least the past five years, while the size and complexity of the business has grown significantly".

Savills directors' base salaries "continue to be positioned significantly below market median against the FTSE 250", the remuneration committee said.

The total amount Savills paid out to its non-executive directors rose 3 per cent to £364m, an average of £73,000 each.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation