Walk through Liverpool city centre and you are walking through one company’s order book. Local press has reported that Legacie Developments is behind more than 70% of the city centre’s live construction projects. Its 656-apartment flagship, The Gateway, tops out with the Housing Secretary in attendance and completes at the end of 2026.
HM Land Registry has recorded roughly a quarter of a billion pounds of property transactions at six completed Legacie-linked scheme addresses. So here is a question that sounds easy: how much profit did those towers make?
The public record cannot tell you. Not because anything is hidden unlawfully — every company involved files exactly what the law requires — but because of how the group is built. That structure is the story.
One company per tower
Legacie is not one company. Around its founder, John Morley, sits a network of roughly fifty: a main contractor, a management-and-lettings arm, service companies — and, for each development, its own special-purpose company. The Gateway has one. Parliament Square has one. Element, The Residence in Salford, One Park Lane, The Mercantile: one each. Several schemes sit in jointly controlled vehicles under the Nexus Residential name, a Tunbridge Wells-registered partner — including One Baltic Square, which is majority-owned by the Nexus side, not by Morley.
One-company-per-scheme is normal in development. Lenders like it: their security sits in a clean box. What matters here is what it does to the public record, because each of those boxes files its own accounts — and almost all of them qualify for the UK’s small-company and micro-entity regimes.
That means: no audit, and in most cases no profit-and-loss account at all. A tower can sell hundreds of flats and its company’s public filing will show you a one-page balance sheet. This is expressly permitted; omitting the P&L under the small-companies regime is a filing choice the law provides. But the effect compounds across fifty companies.
A fair question at this point: doesn’t a micro-entity’s accounts include a profit and loss? Yes — and that’s the trick of it. A micro or small company prepares a P&L; its directors see it, HMRC sees it. But what it must file at Companies House is only the balance sheet: micro-entities file balance-sheet-only by default, and small companies can “fillet” the P&L out of the filed copy. The choice is sometimes stated in so many words — the accounts of the founder’s own Aughton Estates say, verbatim, “The directors have chosen to not file a copy of the company’s profit & loss account.” So the per-site profit figure exists, in a document somewhere; the public just never sees it. (This is scheduled to change: under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, small and micro companies are set to file their profit and loss accounts as part of the Companies House reforms rolling out from 2027 — at which point analysis like this gets much sharper.)
The builder that barely makes money
The engine room is Legacie Contracts Limited — the group’s construction arm, and the one entity that files full, audited accounts (its parent, Legacie Investments Limited, files an audited consolidation that contains just this one subsidiary).
| FY end Sep | Turnover | Gross profit | Pretax profit | Reported profit | Staff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | £97.1M | £2.9M | £26k | £504k | 105 |
| 2024 | £116.1M | £4.0M | £76k | £815k | 118 |
| 2025 | £82.0M | £3.9M | £162k | £637k | 108 |
Read that middle column again. On £116M of revenue, pretax profit of £76k — a margin of 0.07%. In FY25, 0.20%. A hundred-million-pound-a-year builder that, before tax, roughly breaks even.
Two disclosures in its own notes explain the shape. First, who the customer is:
57% of the contractor’s FY25 turnover — 65% the year before — came from companies under common control: the group’s own tower companies. The accounts state these trades were on arm’s-length terms, and that some related trade (with wholly-owned group members) is exempt from disclosure, so the true share may be higher still. The same notes show £9.4M of its trade debtors owed by related companies, the entire £4.9M payments-on-account balance due to related companies, and £2.3M of purchases (FY24: £5.7M) from businesses owned by family members of the controlling party — none of them named.
Second, where the reported profit comes from:
In both years the company’s reported profit is a multiple of its pretax profit, because the tax line is a credit — principally research-and-development-related adjustments (£539k in FY25, £794k in FY24). R&D claims by construction companies are lawful and these are disclosed in the tax note. But strip them out and the implied after-tax result is roughly £98k in FY25 and £21k in FY24. The builder, on its own numbers, runs at about break-even before its tax credits.
So how much corporation tax did the £100M-a-year builder actually pay? Its own cash-flow statement answers directly: none in either year — in FY25 it received £800,000 of income taxes. It also carries £1.3M of trading tax losses forward, unused. All lawful, all on the face of the accounts; and since the tower companies’ micro filings disclose no tax line at all, this is the only tax number the public record offers for the group.
The same is true of boardroom pay. Aggregate directors’ remuneration at the builder went from £283k in FY24 to £921k in FY25, plus pension contributions of £25k and £64k respectively — a total package of £985k, shared among the eight directors who served during the year (the accounts don’t split out a highest-paid director). Set against a £162k pretax profit, the board’s package was nearly six times what the company earned before tax. And because directors’ pay is a note to the P&L, the tower companies’ filed accounts disclose no pay at all — so, like the tax line, this is the only remuneration figure the public record offers for the entire network.
What the tower companies show — and what they can’t
Each scheme company follows the same arc through its filings: deepening negative net assets during the build (finance and build costs land before completion monies), then a swing back toward zero in the sales year.
Element – The Quarter is the cleanest example: 454 flats sold in 2023 for £43.3M at a £95,950 median, and the company’s filings run from £6.1M negative during the build to £37k positive after the sales year. One Baltic Square bottomed at −£8.2M and its latest filing still shows −£1.8M, with the accounts noting the balance sheet is “overdrawn” and the company has the support of its (Nexus) group. The Residence in Salford registered £75.1M of sales in 2025 — every one of them after its latest filed balance-sheet date, which shows −£4.3M.
Be precise about what this does and does not mean. These are balance-sheet snapshots, not profit figures. A company can pass enormous value through to contractors, lenders and other group companies during the build and legally end near zero; without a filed P&L there is no public way to see the flows. Several of the negative positions simply pre-date the sales. What the filings establish is narrower and stranger: for a quarter of a billion pounds of completed flats, no public document states what profit the projects made.
The disclosure gap is structural. The audited perimeter covers one company — the builder. The tower companies sit outside it, filing unaudited small or micro accounts (the jointly held Nexus vehicles generally file the fuller small-company variant; several wholly-owned Legacie vehicles file bare micro accounts — a pattern that tracks ownership but also, importantly, the statutory size tests a pre-sales SPV easily meets). No public filing consolidates the network. Private management or lender accounts may well exist; the public just never sees them.
The stress signals worth watching
The filings do carry some forward-looking texture. In mid-2025, charges were registered over named lists of unsold apartments — eleven at The Residence in Salford, eight at One Park Lane — in favour of Together Commercial Finance, followed in 2026 by a further charge over the whole Salford building. Borrowing against completed-but-unsold stock is a legitimate tool; it is also a dated, public record of which schemes had not sold through. The group’s lender roster throughout — Together, Maslow Capital, ICG Longbow, 15PM LLP — is specialist development money rather than clearing-bank lending, with the founder’s long-standing property company, Aughton Estates (net assets £7.7M against £27M of long-term creditors), pledging its subordinated loans to the One Park Lane companies as part of that scheme’s security package.
And the machine keeps growing: The Gateway — acquired after the scheme stalled under its liquidated previous developer — holds £36.1M of accruals and deferred income at its last filing ahead of its 2026 completion, and new companies have appeared for schemes in Manchester and Salford through 2025.
The quarter-billion-pound question
None of this is an allegation. Every structure described here is lawful, every figure is from a public filing or the Land Registry, and the related-party trading is disclosed in the group’s own audited notes, described there as arm’s-length. The point is simpler and, we think, more interesting: Britain’s filing regime lets a city-scale development group operate with exactly one audited window — a builder that roughly breaks even — while the entities that sold a quarter of a billion pounds of homes disclose two-line balance sheets. If you wanted to know what Liverpool’s building boom actually earned, the honest answer is: the public record cannot tell you.
Figures are from the companies’ filed accounts and HM Land Registry price-paid data. Land Registry data records addresses and prices, not sellers; company balance-sheet positions are as at each company’s own filing dates.