In an era of diversifying B2B brands, UK media people were stunned by the announcement last week that the 166-year old Estates Gazette (curiously re-branded as EG in 2017) would close “during 2025”. It is believed the weekly magazine (which launched in the year that Darwin published his theory of evolution) will close on 25 January but the data services may continue beyond then.
The closure decision was a surprise for at least three reasons:
First, it had long one of the UK’s most profitable B2B magazines. In 1990, it had been acquired by the then Reed Business Publishing (RBP) for £59mn (10x EBITDA), believed to be the highest price then paid for a B2B brand in the UK. Our estimates of its peak performance in 2006 are that it accounted for 11% of the 2,000-person RBP’s revenue and 35% of the total EBITDA. Its standout 44% profit margin had even increased in the first year of Reed ownership, amid jokes that the company had simply bought a second fax machine in order to increase the volume of unsolicited ad bookings. In the following decade, the largest issues of the weekly magazine were more than 200 pages. Estates Gazette really did seem like ‘a licence to print money’.
| SnapShot Estates Gazette (RELX) | ||||
| £mn | 1991 | 2006 | 2019 | 2023 |
| Revenue | 15 | 27 | 19 | 12 |
| EBITDA | 7 | 12 | 6 | — |
| Margin | 47% | 44% | 32% | — |
| People | 75 | 150 | 115 | |
Second, it had been the first of Reed’s magazines to develop profitable digital media. Estates Gazette Interactive (EGi) was launched in 1996 by managing director Mark Kelsey (who has, since 2012, been the transformational CEO of the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, of RELX). He had realised that, while subscribers spent longer reading Estates Gazette than many other B2B brands, they spent even more time (and money) on databases that collated the real estate deals which populated the magazine’s pages and archives. At the dawn of the internet, Kelsey led the building of a database of every significant commercial building in the UK, including land which might be built on. EGi now has decades of data on sales, prices, rents, tenants, and leases for the industry of agents, brokers, lenders and investors. It was a far-sighted initiative which became the template for all-digital services in Reed’s best remaining B2B verticals after a sell-off of 60+ print magazines. In 2023, the data is believed to have accounted for two-thirds of the revenue of what had become the company’s last magazine.
Third, the publisher is closing EG, having failed to sell the business (even to its closest competitor) throughout much of 2024. The owner of what has so recently been one of the largest B2B brands in the UK has given up, even though it had an estimated £12mn revenue in 2023.
For almost three decades, Estates Gazette was the ads-stuffed, 25,000-circulation weekly flagship of what was successively RBP, Reed Business Information and, now, Lexis-Nexis. As Kelsey said two years ago: “It led to one of the key foundation stones for RBI later transitioning to a data and analytics business. In 1994-5, we were thinking a lot about what else we could deliver to our commercial property readers (EG was a real bible of the industry and avidly read for over 60 minutes each week by the readers). There was a catalyst moment.
“We were getting back the results from our research on a ‘day in the life’ of our readers and they talked about how many hours they spent working through databases of deals and people in the industry – something we touched on each week. We would get thousands of press releases and PR bits on “deals & people” and published just a few highlights and we realised we could build these comprehensive databases. I can remember employing a team of six young chartered surveyors to work on a six-month project to map out this future business proposal. We built up the business case to have comprehensive databases on deals, leases, buildings, ownership and a who’s who of the industry – together with a real time news service.
“It researched incredibly well – with our ‘hello brand’ giving it real authority. We called it “EGi” and launched in June 1996. Interestingly we had a completely separate team for EGi from Estates Gazette …. some 30 new people on a completely different floor from the magazine, in Wardour Street, in London’s Soho. This was essential to create a new culture (Estates Gazette was very traditional and its people saw EGi as a real threat to its future). So this was the first of our ‘paid for online data services’.”
It was a far-sighted strategy. But what happened in the intervening three decades?
Last week’s announcement was stark: “The group’s parent company has taken the tough decision to start the process of withdrawing all EG products and services from the market during 2025. After serving as a partner to the UK commercial real estate industry since 1858, the decision to close the EG business, which includes the EG magazine, EG Radius data business and EG Propertylink listings business, has not been taken lightly. However, the headwinds that have struck the whole of the commercial real estate industry hard have had an irreparable impact on the EG business.”
But, although the market had been depressed by the pandemic and its subsequent impact on the demand for business property, industry insiders have doubted that this was the reason for the apparent descent into losses. Managing director Chris Fleetwood, said: “The past few years have been very difficult for the real estate industry as a whole, and EG has been caught in these headwinds too. We have worked hard to fortify the business but have unfortunately had to make this extremely difficult decision.”
But the market is actually said to be growing again.
The collapse of EG to the point when the company couldn’t find a buyer after almost nine months of trying (said to include abortive negotiations with another publisher) has not been explained. Nor is the reason why the RELX subsidiary seems to be preferring now to close the business instead of trying to protect at least some parts (say, the data services) and some jobs.
But the reasons seem clear.
For all its pioneering data strategy, the Estates Gazette group has, in recent years, been outpaced by newer, all-digital competitors, one in particular.
Green Street Advisors (GSA) is the five-year-old, UK real estate information subsidiary of a long-established US-based, private equity-owned parent. It has proved to be a formidable competitor for the once-mighty Estates Gazette and operates in North America and across Europe. In the UK, it claims to be market leader in real estate analysis and research and – since its £23mn acquisition of React News in 2021 – has been competing strongly with EG on news. That’s in addition to its growing portfolio of high-quality research reports.
It has trebled revenue in just four years and (with 80% from subscriptions) now has almost double the EG group revenue:
| SnapShot Green Street Advisors UK | ||||
| £mn | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |
| Rev | 22.7 | 16.9 | 12.3 | 7.7 |
| Ebitda | 3.6 | (2.6) | (2.2) | (0.6) |
| Margin | 16% | — | — | — |
| People | 147 | 83 | 68 | 39 |
The fact is that GSA’s £22.7mn all-digital revenue in 2023 compares with a mere £8mn of digital revenue for EG (the magazine and events contribute the remaining £4mn). The RELX brand has been lagging behind GSA since 2020-21: a guilty secret which remained unmentioned this week amid the shock and tears. Managers have claimed that the legendary B2B brand’s problems have been the competition with Metropolis, publisher of longtime print and digital challenger Property Week. And, of course, there are those claimed “headwinds”, a code for issues seemingly beyond their control.
The dying Estates Gazette is still claiming to be the market leader and “the property journal of choice…the first contributory database for the UK property sector.” But it is being beaten on data, news and research by GSA (and also by another US data operator, CoStar) and on events by Property Week. It has been a fight for which the once-formidable B2B brand has seemed ill-equipped. GSA’s 2021 acquisition of React News (led by a former EG executive) had doubled the pain for the longtime leader which was already losing the battle for data subscriptions.
In the heat of the pandemic, it was losing muscle and money too.
It’s ironic that the RELX subsidiary’s last print publication (of a portfolio that had once comprised literally hundreds of them) might actually have blunted the EG group’s competitive edge (and even made it complacent) almost 30 years after Mark Kelsey had created the post-digital role model.
Ultimately, it’s an ignominious defeat for the same Estates Gazette that had been a B2B powerhouse for so long. Wonder no more about this month’s curious, untimed decision to close the business with no explanation of why it couldn’t even be sold and what had gone wrong. It’s all too painful.
