Spire Property Management has waved goodbye to Paramount Property Fund, which they put together from scratch and built up to over R3-bn of property assets, following its recent acquisition by Investec’s listed fund, Growthpoint.

“It was sad to say farewell to Paramount, as it has been the prime focus of our attention over the past 5 years”, says Spire’s Managing Director, Bruce Kerswill. “We also had to say goodbye to several of our staff members, who moved across to IPG to continue managing the portfolio. Spire was a close-knit team, which we built up over five5 years. However the process of handing over Paramount management to IPG has gone very well and in a spirit of excellent co-operation and good faith, and we believe the staff that have left us will have good careers there””.

In the meantime, Spire has refocused its team and is concentrating on building up its private client management business. The group will be maintaining its traditional hands-on property management approach and the philosophy of looking to add value to their clients’ assets.

The team, which includes well-known property personalities Rodney Squire-Howe, Bruce Kerswill and Keith Craddock, says that it is business as usual, with Spire maintaining its strong focus on the growth of their private client base with a high level of service.

Says Kerswill, “We will be focusing our attention on our current private client base as well as its future growth, and will be maintaining our position as a niche, premier manager of prime property assets.”

“Already we are experiencing growth from new clients who have been referred by our existing clients. I believe that our success can be attributed to our approach of offering a very personal, tailor-made service, and the fact that we look intensely at extracting value from the properties we manage.”, ” says Kerswil

“We have restructured our team and made some senior management changes, with Marc Edwards being promoted to General Manager of Spire Property Management while Alex Ackron will head up Spire’s sectional title business, Intersect. Our recent growth has also led to the appointment of three new portfolio managers, who bring some young blood into the organization.”

Spire continues to operate on a countrywide basis, and is managing a portfolio of retail, office and industrial properties. The portfolio ranges from smaller, niche shopping centres to large scale office developments, and in the Western Cape, includes well-known properties such as Dean Street Mall, The Old Bakery shopping centre, Protea Place tower block and Tannery Park office park.

The Spire team is supported by sophisticated technology - their state-of-the-art property management system ‘Intuit Real Estate Solutions’ (previously MRI), is a US developed system, which is recognised as a world leader in property software.

“Intuit/MRI is the foremost property management system in the world and, complemented by our highly experienced accounts team, we are able to provide top-class administration services to our clients.”

“We are looking forward to a future of growth, development and success where we will continue to extract value from properties on behalf of our clients,” Kerswill concluded.

For more information contact Spire Property Management on (021) 685 4020

Article by: Spire Property Management - www.spireprop.co.za