Great estates

Ensuring residents have access to fantastic local amenities is a great selling point for our let residential and commercial portfolio. It also sustains a lot of local jobs, which helps create a virtuous circle for the local economy. We have a lot of rooftop and small-scale ground-mounted solar, but I’d probably only be interested in large-scale ground-mounted solar if it could provide cheap energy for the villagers.

Trading income and diversification

While producing food from our land still very much lies at the heart of what we do, I’m very conscious that the returns from farming are pretty slim, and we need to make money to put back into the estate. That’s why we’ve chosen to invest in diversified opportunities such as our pubs, the brewery and the butchery, and why our Christmas tree business is so important to the estate.

The unfortunate changes to Inheritance Tax reliefs make having a good trading income even more crucial, although I’m not sure that the government understands just how much the uncertainty they have created is dampening the enthusiasm of family-owned businesses to make significant investments. In the future, I’d like to diversify a small proportion of our houses into holiday lets, as that would provide new income for our food, drink and retail businesses.

Governance, values and data

Because the Iliffe family has several other business investments, the estate has a very mature governance structure, which really attracted me to Yattendon when I was looking for my first in-house estate role five years ago. We have a central senior management team that can make decisions very quickly, which is not the same on all rural estates. However, it’s not so big that it feels too corporate.

We have become increasingly data-led when it comes to planning for the future, but because of our community-first ethos, we do make some decisions perhaps more from the heart, such as buying a tenant’s brewery out of administration, although there always has to be a good business case.

The estate has very strong values and culture that have become so ingrained, I’ve never felt the need to write them down anywhere. We haven’t done much around branding outside the village; perhaps we should do more, but we prefer to whisper rather than shout.

Find out more at Yattendon Estate.

The Nettlebed Estate, Oxfordshire

Jess Waddington, Knight Frank

The Nettlebed Estate has a fascinating history. It was bought by the banker Robert Fleming, grandfather of the James Bond author Ian Fleming, in 1903 and is now jointly owned by several of his descendants and various family trusts.

Our ethos is to maintain a vibrant estate based on the principles of the past, but one that uses modern technology and data. Given the complex ownership, the estate could easily become a sum of its parts, so what we are really trying to do is to make something that is unified and more easily managed for future generations.

To streamline the estate’s complex financial reporting structure, we have put in place what I like to call transformative estate office systems. A cloud-based terrier system takes care of all the property management, which previously was just a lot of spreadsheets that made it very hard to have proper oversight of things like residential property compliance.

We’ve also just gone live with a cloud-based accounting system that links everything together and allows us to run Nettlebed as a cohesive estate, whilst also splitting out the various ownership elements. We use some of the data provided to inform the energy-efficiency programme for the estate’s residential portfolio. This means we know if measures such as installing solar panels and air-source heat pumps are delivering material returns for the estate.

Productive partnerships

Dairy farming has existed on the estate since the time when farm holdings traditionally ran on a mixed livestock and arable system. While there aren’t many herds left in this part of Oxfordshire and indeed the Chilterns, we’ve made the decision to continue with the cows, which have been organic for almost 25 years. They are part of the owners’ and the estate’s heritage; the herd supplies some of its milk to the award-winning Nettlebed Creamery, which is owned by a family member.

Community and the environment

Nettlebed is unusual in that it comprises 560 acres of common land protected by Robert Fleming via its own Act of Parliament in 1906. Much of our day-to-day forestry effort goes into ensuring tree safety on the commons, but we are focused on the longer-term biodiversity of the land with projects in place to maintain the rare acid wetland, improve heathland habitat, restore ponds and protect the ancient beech woodland which characterises the Chilterns.

We are delighted that the estate is now home to two Forest Schools; one on the common and the other within the estate’s woodland. Nature-friendly farming is also important across the rest of the estate, which is why the farm is organic. Much of the land is entered into the Countryside Stewardship Scheme and the Sustainable Farming Incentive, and the farm has wildflower fields and margins, bird seed plots and winter feeding, a lapwing plot, barn owl and swift boxes. Current plans include creating a chalk scrape and restoring hedges along former lines. The owners are very involved in their local farm cluster.

Looking ahead, as we continue to focus on building resilience through new and diverse income streams, we hope to re-use some redundant buildings to create unique places for work and leisure activities.

Find out more at nettlebed.org