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Bruntwood win the 2007 Manchester Evening News Business of the Year Awards

Bruntwood have won the MEN Business of the Year award in the £50m+ turnover category in a ceremony, at Manchester’s Midland Hotel. Hosted by Paul Horrocks, editor of the Manchester Evening News and Ruth Badger from The Apprentice the award recognised Bruntwood’s achievements in 2007, their long term focus, consistent management and, long standing support of the city.

This is the 14th year of the awards which have become a key event within Manchester’s calendar. Winning it marked the end of a 3 month process and eventually saw Bruntwood make the final short-list with 3 other highly respected businesses; Pets at Home, NES and Timpsons.

Bruntwood’s CEO, Chris Oglesby commented “All the short listed companies were of a high quality and have achieved great things within their sectors. To have won within such good company makes us very proud of our achievements and very proud of our 450 staff, whose contribution has made this possible.”

Making the presentation Ruth Badger praised the scale and pace of Bruntwood’s activity and specifically referenced the ways they give back to the city and continually invest it’s is wider evolution.

In the past 12 months Bruntwood completed a £440m Commercial Mortgage backed securitization, invested over £225m in their development and investment activity, sponsored the first Manchester International Festival and helped create The Bruntwood Play Writing competition with the Royal Exchange Theatre.

Oglesby commented “The past 12 months have been incredibly busy for us in all aspects of our business. We expanded our service office offer to over 1200 desks with plans in place for a further 900 within the next 12 months and launched The Red Rooms™, our network of over 70 meeting rooms.“

While owning office buildings, Bruntwood have long been clear that they are a customer service business. Oglesby said “Our customer retention runs at 95% which is very rare in our sector and our drive toward World Class Service accreditation has helped us achieve customer advocacy levels which exceed many top quality hotels.”

Bruntwood’s office letting activity throughout the year has been strong not only claiming the largest deals within Manchester and Leeds but controlling 25-40% of all the deals in each of their markets. Oglesby commented “the combination of our high quality product, customer focused approach to deals and the skills of our in house sales team continue to produce strong sales performance.”

On winning the award, Oglesby commented “This is testimony to the quality of our people and strong values which have guided our ethos and activities for over 30 years and I have no doubt will continue to do so for the next 30 years. Bruntwood are not serial award chasers but to be recognised through the MEN awards, with such strong competition makes us very proud.”