Admiral set to invest £20m

Admiral Taverns, the privately-owned tenanted pub company that runs 1,700 pubs, will have invested about £20m on capital schemes in its estate by the end of this year.

The company, founded in 2004, has completed or approved investment schemes for 246 pubs, with an average spend of about £50,000 per pub.

Admiral's board is green-lighting about 15 to 20 capital expenditure schemes a month.

It was very hard to turn around in the early days but we're now achieving good growth.​Chief executive Gary Landesberg.

The investment is an indication of Admiral's determination to build business in its core estate.

Admiral has bought 2,185 pubs in total for about £800m in 11 separate transactions.

It has sold 500 pubs - 25% of the total - with the vast majority sold on an individual basis to licensees, restaurateurs and property developers.

Chief executive Gary Landesberg has described the £70m acquisition of 253 pubs from the bottom end of the Avebury Taverns estate, previously bought by Punch Taverns, as the "hardest deal" the company has done.

Many of the pubs in the bottom-end of the Avebury estate were on temporary trading arrangements to allow options to be kept open.

Admiral has retained 170 of the 253 pubs - and invested in many sites as new tenants arrived.

In just over a year after the Avebury acquisition in August 2005, barrelage figures had moved from -12% to almost 15% growth.

Landesberg, who was speaking at last week's Dresdner Kleinwort UK Pub Outlook 2007 conference, said: "It was very hard to turn around in the early days but we're now achieving good growth."​

Admiral's determination to grow business at the pubs it has bought is indicated by one of lowest business development manager to pubs ratios in the industry - 45 pubs per business development manager.

The pubco has beer flow monitoring equipment in 1,300 of its pubs and employs six cellar inspectors - all of whom are former police officers.

Landesberg said he expected volumes to decrease between 5% and 7% in the wake of July's smoking ban.

But Admiral is taking a pro-active approach to preparations, with a £5m budget for investment.

The company has produced six smoking shelter solutions for tenants, 90% of which have outside smoking areas.

Landesberg indicated that he believed his estate could take business away from the "under-invested free-trade".