In December Anton Bilton led Raven's swoop to snap up Swan Hill. In his first major interview since the controversial acquisition, he tells Steve Menary how the deal came about and his plans for the firm


Hold on a moment" says Anton Bilton, on realising that the interview involves having his photograph taken. 'A button's come off my shirt - I think I'd better put my jacket on'
With that he's gone, flitting in and out of rooms in his offices at the top end of Knightsbridge overlooking Hyde Park searching for the discarded jacket

Having been in Mexico until mid-January, this is the first interview he has given about his company Raven Group's December takeover of listed housebuilder Swan Hill.
"There's only so much I can say at the moment" he says after returning with a jacket and slightly embarrassed apology for the delay - then proceeds to say a fair bit The acquisition valued Swan Hill at £48 million but was an innovative deal that did not see any cash change hands.
Instead, Swan Hill's shareholders swapped each of their shares for stock of the same value in a cash shell owned by Raven that is listed on the junior Alternative Investment MarketRaven is already involved in housebuilding and acquires and redevelops run-down buildings, such as old schools, stately homes and a chain of 11 former NHS hospitals. But anyone thinking the Swan Hill buy-out was an expansion of these activities would be wrong.

"We're not looking to run Swan Hill in the long-term," he explains. "And we didn't do this to take advantage of a quoted vehicle; we did it to take advantage of the discount in the share price.
"We're not looking at breaking the business up - our game plan is that we've bought into Swan Hill at a good value and we're looking to sell the business on in its entirety"
Having snapped Swan Hill up at 80p per share, Raven wants to offload the business for closer to the value of its assets, which Bilton puts at 130p per share and believes is achievable.
Swan Hill's board wanted 100p per share as long ago as 2001 before realising that a buyer may not want its property portfolio. Much of this was sold but no buyers emerged and by last autumn, Raven was - to use Bilton's words - "hot" on the deal.

Instead of approaching Swan Hill's board and chief executive John Theakston directly, he approached the four largest institutional shareholders that controlled 51% of the stock with his innovative proposal.
This was the deal: Raven Mount would be floated on AIM in December as a cash shell with £2 million of Raven Group's money to show willing. Swan Hill's shares would transfer over to form
Raven Mount and Bilton and his partners would take a 15% cut of any increase in the sale value of this business - the same proportion as the other shareholders.
When the four shareholders agreed, Swan Hill's management was stumped and the deal went through.

nothing personal

Occasionally Bilton asks for the tape recorder to be switched off but only for a spot of property gossip and is unfailingly polite about Swan Hill's board throughout the interview.
"This was nothing personal. It was strictly a business opportunity," insists Bilton. 'They've been really charming, nice people and couldn't have been more professional."
Building work is continuing on all Swan Hill's sites as normal and he wants the 130 staff to remain and continue demonstrating the value in the business that he wants to realise.
Raven has drawn up an information pack on Swan Hill and this will be sent out to interested parties in early February.
Bilton expects three types of potential suitors for the firm: northern housebuilders looking to move south, Irish firms wanting to move or grow in the UK and companies just wanting to expand. He admits to having had a lot of expressions of interest and says: "I'd be disappointed if we weren't in discussions with someone by the end of February."
Bilton acknowledges that despite the interest being shown, concluding a deal at the right price is not simple because Raven must demonstrate what they perceive the real value of Swan Hill is to a prospective buyer.
At one point Bilton refers to Swan Hill as "sleepy" - an adjective used in a newspaper headline about the deal, which at least shows he reads his own stories - only to correct himself, apologising to the firm's staff as he does so.

Yet the firm's reputation is not the problem and Bilton himself praises the quality of Swan Hill's houses but admits that the landbank, the principal asset may present a problem.
Despite many smaller quoted housebuilders being gobbled up for their land in recent years, Swan Hill's landbank - 648 plots at the last count in September 2003 - is not massive. As a simple comparison, last year Wilson Bowden paid £29.1 million for Henry Boot's northern based housing business, which had 1,332 plots.
The fast-talking but friendly Bilton has already said far more than expected and prefers not to elaborate on the landbank issue but, when pressed, admits to having another plan for Swan Hill.
"If we don't sell the business for what we think is the right value, we will focus on the sheltered housing sector," he adds. "You only have to look at McCarthy & Stone to see the value there. What we would do is bring in the expertise"

fall-back option

This would only be a fall-back option and, as Bilton has been linked with a take-over of clothes shop Austin Reed, this suggests his foray into the mainstream of the housebuilding industry may be brief.
Not so. Instead, he has an investors view of the industry.
'What annoys me about the housebuilding industry is that it's all about how many homes you build and that's a lot of crap," he says. "It's an anomalous appraisal of the industry. I'd rather build one home a year and make £400 million."
That sounds like a line from Wall Street the hit 1980s film about corporate excess, and one that would be met with a pugnacious response from Downing Street
Yet the slender Bilton has far more charisma than Gordon Gekko, the overblown antihero of Oliver Stone's epic -
certainly enough to attract Tara Palmer Tomkinson and model Lisa B as girlfriends and make him a doyenne of the gossip columns.
Raven does build homes, albeit fewer than 100 in 2003, but Bilton, the grandson of property tycoon Sir Percy P lton, prefers to describe his company as a merchant developer - and he sees the housebuilding industry as ripe for development
Apart from the retail sector, he believes that housebuilders are among the most undervalued businesses on the stock market
If he can sell Swan Hill and demonstrate to the big institutions that his plan works, Raven will look to apply the same formula to bigger firms and he sees plenty of targets.
"With our structure, we could do a similar deal for a business that's valued at £800 million," he adds.
"What we're bringing is strategic direction at board level. We want to get into attractive value situations where the existing management would perhaps be less willing to put the business up for sale.
'We didn't do this deal for just this transaction and to make some money on Swan Hill. We want to show these institutions that we can do it again to make some more money."
With that he graciously poses for a few photos and dashes off to lunch, the button on his shirt left unfound.