Taylor Wimpey falls deeper into red amid regional office closures

HOUSEBUILDER Taylor Wimpey slumped deeper into the red at the underlying level last year as it posted more big exceptional writedowns and shut three regional offices, including one in Scotland.

Among the offices to face the axe was its Bryant subsidiary office for east Scotland.

The firm, which still employs about 200 staff north of the Border in its Taylor Wimpey East Scotland and Taylor Wimpey West Scotland offices, made an underlying pre-tax loss of 96.1 million last year against a loss of 74.7m in 2008.

After exceptional writedowns of land and work in progress amounting to 603.8m – of which 445m was in the UK – overall losses came in at 640.6m against a loss of 1.8 billion in 2008.

The group, formed from the merger of Taylor Woodrow and George Wimpey in 2007, yesterday noted improved trading in the second half of last year as it achieved operating profits of 43.3m for 2009. It said trading in the UK, which includes more than 30 developments in Scotland, had also been encouraging in the first two months of 2010.

Peter Redfern, chief executive of Taylor Wimpey, said: "Trading conditions for our main businesses stabilised through 2009 and we were pleased to return to operating profit in both the UK and North America in the second half of the year.

"Whilst we remain cautious, we are continuing to see slowly improving conditions across our main markets."

Taylor completed the sale of 10,186 homes in the UK last year, down on the 13,394 in 2008. The average selling price fell to 160,000 from 171,000.

Taylor said there was potential for a "significant recovery" in house prices when mortgage availability increased and consumer confidence returned.

Taylor concluded a refinancing deal last April that gave it bank facilities of 2.47bn. A 510m cash call on shareholders also helped reduce its debt to 750m from 1.5bn at the end of 2008.