Savills Share News (SVS)

LONDON (Alliance News) - Property services firm Savills PLC boosted its dividend Thursday after reporting strong profit and revenue growth in 2017 and a "solid" start to 2018 despite market uncertainty.

In 2017, pretax profit expanded 13% to GBP112.4 million from GBP99.8 million the year prior. This was after revenue rose 11% to GBP1.60 billion from GBP1.45 billion the year before.

Savills proposed a final dividend of 25.55 pence per share, up 3.9% from 24.60p the year prior. For the full year, the dividend grew 4.1% to 30.2p from 29.0p the year before.

"Savills has delivered another strong performance in 2017," Savills Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Helsby said. "Revenue and profits grew in each of our global Transaction Advisory, Consultancy and Property Management businesses despite challenging conditions in a number of markets. The strength of our business in key transactional markets across the globe, including a highly resilient performance in our UK residential business, were key to this result."

"Throughout the year we maintained our focus on delivering exceptional service to our clients and continued to build on our global network through complementary acquisitions and new team hires," Helsby added.

"We have made a solid start to 2018 with a pipeline of business carried over from last year in many markets, although this is against the backdrop of heightened market uncertainty, geopolitical risks and rising interest rates," Helsby continued. "We anticipate a tempering of the strong transaction volumes of recent times in some markets; however, at this early stage in the year our expectations for 2018 remain unchanged."

Shares in Savills were 0.4% higher at 980.00 pence on Thursday.