Redrow said the firm was now gearing up to expand the number of sites rather than sales rates to drive further growth.
Steve Morgan, Chairman of Redrow, said the firm was forecasting turnover to jump 40% to £1.6bn by 2018, operating margins to improve to 19% and return on capital employed to be in excess of 21% “despite our ongoing investment in land and inventory to grow our outlets.”
To fuel the growth Redrow said 15% of its direct workforce were now in training, the highest ratio in the home building industry.
Over the year turnover jumped a third to £1.15bn generating a pre-tax profit of £213m, up 53%.
Morgan said: “I am pleased to announce another set of record results. For the first time in our history, we generated turnover in excess of £1bn, up 33% on last year.
“We built and sold over 4,000 homes across the UK last year, up 12% from the year before and around 42% more than in 2013.
“Pre-tax profits also reached record levels, up 53% as we saw the benefit from our early site acquisitions post the downturn. This strong performance has led the Board to propose a dividend of 4p per share, double that paid in the last financial year.”
He added: “Looking ahead, we have entered the year with a record order book and reservations to date are running 5% ahead of last year at 0.68 sales per outlet per week.
“We have secured 820 private reservations in the first 10 weeks, some 28% ahead of last year.”
The Government’s Help to Buy scheme remains a major driver for the industry to increase output accounting for 40% or 1,374 of Redrow private legal completions.
Morgan said he had seen a slight flattening in sales rates and now expected growth in the business in the future to come from increasing outlets, rather than sales rate.
Redrow is now operating from 117 outlets, 14% more than June 2014 when there were 103.
Last year Redrow acquired just under 6,000 plots across 52 sites and, after taking into account legal completions, land sales and replans, the owned and contracted land bank increased by nearly 1,500 plots to 18,216.
