IT IS a Tuesday morning and there is a crush of visitors at reception in the Amsterdam offices of La Perla International Living. A few floors up, in the smart office block overlooking a canal and a city park, sits the CE, founder and principal owner, Geert Duizendstraal, a calm centre to the bustle around him.

Since buying a house in Marbella in 1987, the 55-year-old Dutchman has built a business spanning eight countries that develops upmarket second homes and sells services to the owners. Whether they buy a chateau in the Dordogne or a beachfront villa in Panama, Duizendstraal’s company promises to take away the problems of ownership by maintaining the property while they are away and providing hotel-style services while they are there.

A measure of the success of the business model is that the privately held Dutch company is preparing for a reverse takeover by Mandarine Group, a listed French company, that will give it easier access to capital. The company made a net profit of à26m on sales of à78m in 2006, compared with a profit of à24m on sales of à57m in 2005.

La Perla, named after Duizendstraal’s daughter, Perle, has grown rapidly since 1995 when he decided to invest à500000 in a plot of land on an Andalusian hillside, with views of the Atlas mountains across the Mediterranean in Morocco.

What set it apart from other developers was the pioneering offer of services such as cleaning, maintenance and even doing the grocery shopping to buyers of its properties — thus creating a bridge between a typical holiday home and a hotel. The company now also sells luxury houses in Vietnam, Antigua and Austria.

Disarmingly, Duizendstraal refers to the enterprise as “a hobby that degenerated”. Although he always had a keen interest in property, he spent much of his early career in the computer industry. Now his “hobby” has put him in the annual rich list of the Dutch magazine Quote, with an estimated fortune last year of à109m.

Duizendstraal launched La Perla with Geert-Jan Itjeshorst, a friend and shareholder, and another, unnamed, friend who has been the third shareholder for the past 10 years.

After reading mathematics at Delft university, Duizendstraal joined Dutch food distributor Wessanen in 1977, later moving to the computer division of US-based Gould Electronics, and then in 1986 to Convex Computer Corporation, a Dallas-based start-up, as manager for northern Europe.

Several experiences at Convex indicated his future path. First, he worked under contract for Convex via his own company, which allowed him to devote 5% of his time to other projects. Second, share options in the successful start-up gave him some capital. And third, he played a role in building a business. “Growth, growth, growth: that was all that counted at the time,” he says. “It was a fantastic environment to work in.”

But by 1993 Hewlett-Packard had bought Convex and Duizendstraal was looking for a change. “I quit because I was travelling nonstop and had small children,” he says.

The next year Duizendstraal decided to move with his family to his house in Marbella, where he had also set up a fledgling property brokerage. He split his time between Spain and the Netherlands, running his own small venture capital firm in his home country. But it was the Spanish real estate project that took off. “When I bought my own house I realised how difficult it was for a foreigner to buy real estate abroad,” he says.

From the brokerage he progressed to buying and refurbishing homes. Then he purchased land on the Andalusian hillside and built and sold La Perla’s first 25 houses.

Guided by his own taste, Duizendstraal built luxury houses in keeping with local architectural traditions. “You start with something and later on you think: what is the logic of what I’ve done?” he says. “At the time people said: ‘You are the ones building this very nice Andalusian village on the hill.’ We said: ‘Yes we are.’ That’s maybe something we have to continue, we thought.”

Duizendstraal had established two of the three guiding principles of his business model: a breathtaking location and a mix of traditional architecture with modern amenities. The third, services, took longer to ferment. “It helped that I didn’t have any serious roots in the real estate industry because later on people told me not to go into services because it’s a headache,” he says.

Initially, La Perla had to swallow losses from its service business, particularly when only a handful of houses on a site had been completed. It was also the hardest element in building the company. “It turned out to be very cumbersome, very difficult and very demanding, but it also turned out to be welcomed by our clients,” Duizendstraal says.

As a result, La Perla is now one of the biggest employers in Antigua and has watched others follow it down a similar path, including hotel brands such as Kempinski.

Duizendstraal frequently hires people from the hotel industry to set up the services in new locations, but he has also found himself going back to former colleagues from the computer companies where he worked in the past.

“Getting the right people is crucial,” he says.

Financing has been less onerous. La Perla initially funded projects from payments by customers buying off plan, then took on bank loans and, later, informal financing from customers. “All the business guys that are there on holiday with the family, the first days they spend with the family. After a few days they’re bored and they come and say: ‘What are you doing? That’s interesting’,” Duizendstraal says.

However, a decision last year to raise $125m to $150m in

The three La Perla shareholders will control 60% of the new company, which will also take La Perla’s name and brand. And Duizendstraal will be CE of a Euronext-listed company.

“It has advantages and disadvantages,” he says, noting the strict disclosure rules for public companies.

“I used to talk freely about how La Perla was doing; now I have to be careful. But it will be a lot easier to finance our growth for the next five to 10 years.” Financial Times

Source: Business Day