Interview: Don Jordison - Threadneedle

Threadneedle’s managing director of property investments, Don Jordison, makes it crystal clear on which side he stands.

“I was speaking to one big property fund manager the other day, and I found out he never found the time to pass his driving test – what a cop out,” he says with a disdainful scowl.

And it would seem Mr Jordison’s hands-on-the-steering-wheel approach has paid off.

Threadneedle has emerged as an industry-leading property group with £4bn under management.

More recently, the group’s direct property funds adopted a high cash position early on in the financial crisis, allowing them to avoid much of the pain suffered by less cautious rivals.

Over 10 years, 90 per cent of the range is now top quartile, ranked against the Investment Property Databank (IPD) index.

But Mr Jordison had a bad year in 2005, when massive retail investment led to cash levels ballooning across the fund range.

“That’s a bad place to be, because you either buy a lot of property and there are massive costs associated with those transactions, or you hold a lot of cash and if the market goes up your performance gets battered,” he says.

This is not what has happened for Mr Jordison and his consistent performance has been recognised.

Just last month Hargreaves Lansdown put his UK Property fund on its prestigious Wealth 150 list – the first ever such fund to make it onto the coveted list.

And the vehicles’ high cash positions provided another major benefit.

Liquidity flooded out of the property market during the credit crunch, and rival groups suspended redemptions from funds across the board, devastating already stricken investors.

But Mr Jordison is blunt when it comes to redemptions: “Open ended should mean open ended,” he says, noting that Threadneedle was able to answer every withdrawal request.

Both the City and Threadneedle’s board actually have Mr Jordison’s “saintly” sister to thank for putting him on the property investment path. Mr Jordison decided to take a degree in Urban Estates Surveying at Nottingham Trent University in 1980 – the same course his sister had taken a few years earlier.

His first job was at Hambro Life, the group that was later to become Allied Dunbar before morphing into Threadneedle Asset Management.

“I joined Hambro after college as a junior surveyor,” he says. “I was looking after properties owned by financial institutions. It was all the day-to-day stuff; measuring walls, taking care of leases and all that.”

But after two years of hard graft, it dawned on Mr Jordison that a career in property investing was going to be impossible without any training in finance.

Luckily for him his employer, Allied Dunbar, agreed to stump up the cash for him to study an MBA at City University. However it was only after he started the course that the group casually informed him that, if he were to fail, he would have to hand back all of the fees.