The Berkeley Group Holdings plc is a British property developer and house-builder based in Cobham, England. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. History The company was founded by Tony Pidgley and Jim Farrer in Weybridge in 1976 as Berkeley Homes, a name borne by regional subsidiaries. Pidgley (the dominant partner) and Farrer had previously run the housing division of Crest Homes and they aimed to focus on executive housing on single plots or small sites. Over the next few years, Berkeley expanded across the home counties, and while building less than 100 houses a year, it floated its shares on the Unlisted Securities Market in 1984. After the flotation, Berkeley expanded geographically to the west, the south midlands, and East Anglia; it also formed a joint venture, St George, to build in central London. By 1988, Berkeley was building over 600 executive homes a year. By then Pidgley was aware of the overheating in the housing market and sold houses aggressively to realise cash. For two years the company did no more than break even but its cash position was strong and in 1991 it was able to purchase the Manchester-based Crosby Homes and the outstanding 50% of St George; Berkeley began buying large development sites at distressed prices. The 1990s was the decade in which Berkeley moved its operational orientation to major urban regeneration sites in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and other northern cities. In the early 2000s, Berkeley refined its strategy to concentrate primarily on relatively large scale urban redevelopments in the London area. In 2003 it announced the deferred sale of Crosby Homes. The reduction in scale was intended to generate surplus cash and 2004 saw a scheme of arrangement to return £1.45m to shareholders. In 2015, the company won Large Developer of the Year at the RESI awards organised by Property Week. In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, Berkeley said that coronavirus had cost it £80m in just six weeks and began shutting down most of its sites, having earlier cancelled a £455m shareholder payout. In June 2020, the company announced it was consulting on up to 200 redundancies, and revealed its pre-tax profits were down 35% partly due to the COVID-19 impact, with falls in sales and revenues. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company pushed back payment