The results showed the resilience of property services brand Colliers International, a subsidiary of Quyn.

Colliers has been subjected to value-destructive circumstances as a result of what the property industry has characterised as a clash of egos. A dispute over the strategic direction of Colliers turned the company into a battlefield and brought it to its knees.

A year ago Colliers was in a deep financial trouble. The group was running an overdraft of between R6m and R15m. Colliers' losses were about R15,1m in the year ended September 2001.

It was mainly Colliers' cash flow constraints which saw former Quyn auditors KPMG express reservations about the ability of the group to continue as a going concern.

This followed the departure of Collier's founding directors, MD Pat Flanagan and Peter Gerrard. Jaco Odendaal, who succeeded Flanagan as MD, reigned for a few months and also left.

Many in the industry already had consigned Colliers to history.

However, Quyn's results for the year ended September suggested that Colliers was out of the woods.

A statement accompanying the results says the internal restructuring within Colliers is now complete.

Colliers has been reconstituted into three separate operations property management, broking and developments.

The statement says Colliers suffered some losses during the year under review mainly due to retrenchment costs and the costs of winding down certain nonprofitable operations.

Quyn CEO Ricky Fertig says critical corrective measures included the eradication of the highly ambitious property development projects undertaken by the previous management. This move eliminated a huge proportion of the groups contingent liabilities.

He says the Colliers team was restructured to focus on a development arm, which only involves itself with lucrative and sensible development projects. He says the group aligned its property management division to better service existing and potential management clients, and is set to grow its market share.

'On the property broking side we structured a committed team to focus on servicing an overstocked letting market with great success,' says Fertig, noting that the broking division is also benefiting from its international affiliations.

'An example is Colliers London extending our marketing capability to the overseas residential investment market in the UK and New Zealand,' he says.

While many people question the mix of Colliers with human resources outsourcing services under Quyn, Fertig says the two operations fit well under one roof. His reasoning is: 'Any business in any economy today is driven by three fundamentals: they are product or service; the place at which and from which they operate; and the people who make it happen.'

Fertig says this sums up Quyn's business. The success of the work done over the past year is reflected in Quyn's financial figures. 'In just one year we have completely removed a loss of R19,6m, cleaned up the balance sheet, which carried R125m worth of contingent liabilities, and got rid of our overdraft.'

Quyn is trading under cautionary. The cautionary before this one was issued because the group was engaged in negotiations to bring in a black empowerment partner in Colliers' property management operations. But the initiative collapsed because the empowerment partner could not secure funding.

Fertig says, however, that the group has not given up this course.

Business Day