Tony Pidgley: the Master Builder leaves the stage

Berkeley’s Tony Pidgley, who has died aged 72, was a genius who transformed the housebuilding industry, says Max King

Tony Pidgley
Pidgley was a Barnado’s boy who left school at 15
(Image credit: © Shutterstock)

I always enjoyed company visits as a fund manager. They were a valuable reminder that I was investing in businesses rather than bits of paper and an opportunity to gain insights. Occasionally they were a priceless crash-course in getting to know a company, an industry and how a business should be run. One of those was a trip to Epsom in the early 1990s to see Berkeley Homes, the housebuilder co-founded by Tony Pidgley, who sadly died recently.

Berkeley was then a small company specialising in upmarket houses. Pidgley, a Barnardo’s boy who left school at 15, had started his housing career at Crest Nicholson. He told us that in the 1970s housing slump he had been sent to Kent as their star salesman to shift a new development of 12 houses, only one of which had been sold. In a fortnight, he had sold them all. But over the next few weeks, all but one of the sales fell through. The lesson, he said, was that in one of the sector’s periodic slumps, there is nothing you can do.

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Max King
Investment Writer

Max has an Economics degree from the University of Cambridge and is a chartered accountant. He worked at Investec Asset Management for 12 years, managing multi-asset funds investing in internally and externally managed funds, including investment trusts. This included a fund of investment trusts which grew to £120m+. Max has managed ten investment trusts (winning many awards) and sat on the boards of three trusts – two directorships are still active.

After 39 years in financial services, including 30 as a professional fund manager, Max took semi-retirement in 2017. Max has been a MoneyWeek columnist since 2016 writing about investment funds and more generally on markets online, plus occasional opinion pieces. He also writes for the Investment Trust Handbook each year and has contributed to The Daily Telegraph and other publications. See here for details of current investments held by Max.