David Sleath: the man who builds warehouses for Amazon
While other British developers put up shopping malls, Segro’s boss opted for storage. Now it’s soaring in the online shopping boom
David Sleath of Segro: ‘Ultimately the consumer decides what gets built and what’s required. What we are doing is trying to facilitate that.’
Forget shining skyscrapers, gleaming office blocks or swanky shopping centres; in commercial property, big sheds are where it’s at. Warehouses may not be sexy, but they’ve proved extremely lucrative in the surging world of e-commerce.
Most consumers won’t have heard of Segro, but it will have touched their lives. Items they use every day may have passed through its warehouses: vast landmarks of an online boom that has made it Britain’s most valuable property company.
“We get everyday things. That could be a coffee cup, or it could be something you’ve downloaded on your phone that’s gone through a data centre,” says David Sleath, Segro’s chief executive, seated in a boardroom at the company’s Mayfair head office behind Regent Street. “We create the space to enable extraordinary things to happen,” he adds, without a hint of irony.
There is indeed something extraordinary about Segro’s rocketing trajectory, from its humble roots as Slough Estates Group to a £17bn behemoth in the top third of the FTSE 100. What was once an uninspiring property firm with a disparate bunch of assets including office blocks and a US golf course has become a serious player.
That elevated status can be traced back to Sleath’s decision to bet big on warehouses and industrial property when he took the helm a decade ago. During his tenure, the company has ridden the wave of online retail to overtake competitors with higher-profile assets, such as Land Securities and its Bluewater shopping complex in Kent.
Few would have put money on Segro climbing to where it is today; nor, perhaps, would Sleath have himself. The affable 60-year-old was initially something of a reluctant boss, and unsure whether he wanted to step up after five years as finance director. “I didn’t necessarily see myself as a natural chief executive,” he says. One of the aspects of running a company which didn’t appeal was newspaper interviews, he laughs.
“I thought there’s a good business in here, trying to get out,” he recalls. “The company had a decent-sized portfolio, but was struggling to work out: where did it want to go?”
The glass and polished-wood Mayfair office, with meeting rooms named after innovators including Turing and Newton, feels a world away from the colossal grey cathedrals of consumerism that have sprouted along Britain’s main roads over the past two decades. Segro has been responsible for developing and renting warehouses to the likes of Amazon and Netflix.
