Savills full year 'very significantly ahead' of expectations

In an update for the year to the end of December 2021, the real estate group highlighted particularly strong performances in Continental Europe and the Middle East and North America, both of which it said had more than eliminated the losses of 2020.

"All Savills businesses have exceeded their forecasts notwithstanding the impact of renewed pandemic-related restrictions in many locations," it said. In particular, commercial capital transactions and Prime Residential Agency experienced much stronger completion volumes than expected. Meanwhile, the group’s less transactional businesses also outperformed Savills’ expectations.

Savills said that as previously announced it has benefited from substantially lower levels of discretionary expenditure in respect of travel, entertaining and marketing events. These are expected to revert to more normal levels over the course of this year.

"As a result of this strong trading performance coupled with the benefit of abnormally low levels of discretionary expenditure, the group expects underlying profit before tax for 2021 to be very significantly ahead of the upper end of its previous range of expectations," it said.

The group’s outlook for FY2022 was unchanged.

Savills said the UK performed exceptionally well across all business lines despite pandemic-related uncertainty, with notably strong performances from the transactional business lines, albeit commercial office leasing volumes remained below historic averages in the majority of markets.

"Savills' strengths in both logistics and retail warehousing, both of which enjoyed significant volume increases year-on-year, also contributed to our overall outperformance," it said. "The UK prime residential market continued to perform exceptionally strongly through the last quarter and volumes in the Prime Central London market clearly began to improve."