Episode 50: Ian Livingstone - Co-Founder of London Regional Properties

**Amir Fischer** (0:00)
This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Ian Livingstone, co-founder of London Regional Properties, one of the largest and most respected private investors in Europe. Ian and his brother have spent four decades building quietly and deliberately, letting the results speak for themselves. This is only his second podcast ever. Ian grew up in Ealing, London as a son of a dentist. He studied optometry, qualified in 1984, and five years later, opened his first eyewear store. Within three years, he acquired the David Clulow chain, and growing it to 170 stores, including Concessions Inherits and Selfridges, eventually selling to Luxottica in 2011 With the business he spent four decades quietly building something else entirely. In 1987, at the height of the commercial property crash, Ian and his brother founded London Regional, buying distressed assets at half price while every institution was running for the exits. That contrarian bet became the foundation of a portfolio that today includes David Lloyd Leisure, the Hilton Hotels in London, the Lease Hold on Cliveden House, a $2 billion development in Panama City, and the Fairmont Monte Carlo among others. In our conversation, we talked about going from optometrist to entrepreneur, the conviction it took to buy when everyone else was selling, four decades of family control, how he sees opportunity across wildly different asset classes and what the market looks like to him right now. This episode also marks a milestone, episode 50 of Generating Alpha. Thank you to everyone who has followed along since the beginning. As always, if you've enjoyed this episode, please follow the podcast. Rated five stars on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube and share it to anyone who you think might find it valuable. I really enjoyed talking to Ian and I hope you guys enjoy listening to this conversation. Thank you. Thanks Ian for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Okay. Good. I want to start where I always do. The beginning. If I'm correct, you grew up in Ealing, London, the son of a dentist. Tell me a little bit about your childhood, what that environment was like and how you think that might have shaped you.

**Ian Livingstone** (1:55)
I think growing up, most of our friends came from families where they were middle-class professionals, and that was the assumption that you became a professional. So you became a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer or an accountant, and so school really was careers. And it was very, it was living in the end.
And I would say that probably half of them stayed in their careers and half moved out. Some in some to business, aligned to that or something fairly close on. So the expectation was that you did much of the same.

**Amir Fischer** (2:53)
And if I'm correct, you started off in the business or the, in Optometry at City University, qualified in 1984

**Ian Livingstone** (3:04)
Again, as part of being a professional, I was sort of what do you want to do? And I decided that medicine was a bit too long of a slug, even though a lot of my friends and family were all doctors. So I thought optometry was better because ultimately you could have a business as well.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:28)
And that was how I started.

**Amir Fischer** (3:32)
In 1989, if I'm correct, you opened your first optometry store, Optika.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:37)
Yeah, I worked for other people.

**Ian Livingstone** (3:40)
And then I bought my first store in 89 And then I started expanding it in 1990, 91

**Amir Fischer** (3:48)
And yeah, in three years, you fired David Clulow and we're running a chain about worth about 20 million. Tell me about those early days. How did you decide to expand? What was the expansion looking like?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:58)
And yeah, well, I never had much capital.

**Ian Livingstone** (4:03)
And so it was a question of eking out the cash flow, managing your suppliers, your creditors, borrowing a little bit of money from the bank, but keeping borrowings to an absolute minimum, because I didn't really want to be over leverage. And in those days, you could get stores, there was a bit of a financial crisis, I seem to remember one of many, but in those days, landlords had a lot of empty shops and they would give you quite big incentives. So you could end up with a package of a bit of, you know, a years or two years free rent and some capital towards your fit out. So in that case, in many cases, it costs nothing really to get the store open. And then if you traded profitably early days, then that was a great business. So for a while, we enjoyed the benefits of having the landlords on side. Of course, as the economy picked up, then those incentives evaporated, and you had to go and compete with everybody else. But overall, I have to say, it was a good time to be in business because it was dominated. The business was dominated by some groups that were not really that efficient. So that if you could be nimble in business, if you could be quick to change your products, quick to offer different services, and you could differentiate yourself, it was quite an easy time to expand the business. You couldn't do that today, it would be much more difficult.