For the last year Caesar & Howie has been carving out what could be a lucrative niche by advising Polish immigrants on how to buy property in the UK. Now, with at least on enquiry a day, the service seems to be taking off.

In this day and age it is not especially unusual for a Scottish law firm to expand into England as it hunts for lucrative English legal business. Likewise some Scottish firms have opened offices in various far flung locations as they look to service the people and businesses in locations such as Dubai, Azerbaijan and The Falkland Islands to name a few.
You’d therefore be forgiven for thinking that the most logical place to open a new office, if your law firm wanted to provide legal services to Polish people, would be Warsaw, possibly Krakow, maybe even Wroclaw. But that is no longer the case as law firm, The Caesar & Howie Group, is planning to demonstrate later this year by opening an office in the north of England specifically aimed at servicing the growing Polish immigrant community.
Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004 Poles have been pouring into the UK at an incredible rate. Estimates suggest that up to 2 million poles have arrived in the UK since 2004, which in itself establishes them immediately as a significant market to go after. Already the media industry has seized the opportunity to publish newspapers and websites aimed at Polish people living in the UK. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before law firms followed suit.
The launch of Kupdom and its website kupdom.co.uk, a specialist property buying service for Polish immigrants, by Caesar & Howie in 2006 came at a time the firm was taking a long hard look at itself, as managing partner David Barrowman explains: “A few years ago we started to look at our business and we didn’t see a great future for the type of country-based legal business that we were. With Tesco law coming, as it will in some form, we felt that it simply wasn’t safe to rely on business coming in through our doors in the small towns in which we are based. To say we restructured the business would not be quite right, but what we did was launch a number of niche businesses and presented the firm slightly differently. We therefore became The Caesar & Howie Group and under that umbrella we now have the businesses of Kupdom, Senior Issues, Bereavement Legal Services, Central Scotland New Homes and Sportsassist.”
But it is the web-based Polish house buying service Kupdom (Polish for buy your home), which has certainly seized upon the opportunities presented by the growth in the UK Polish population. And it has certainly captured the imagination of Poles both here in the UK and those still in Poland considering a move to the UK.
“We saw the opportunity around 15 months ago, did some research into the whole area and we hired a Polish person, who was a former client of ours who had bought a house through us. We asked him what his experience had been like and he told us it was pretty terrible. There were various issues he had had to content with. Firstly, we couldn’t speak his language and we weren’t geared up to deal with Polish people and the specific issues that they face when trying to find property and get finance together.”
The Pole that Caesar and Howie bought on board to head up Kupdom was Jakub Maleszyk, a graduate of the University of Nicolaus Copernicus, who had moved to Scotland with his wife in 2004. After two years of renting accommodation they quickly became keen to buy their own property. A friend put them in touch with Caesar and Howie and the rest, as they say, is history as Jakub explains: “We did not know where to get information on buying property, so a friend who was a Caesar & Howie client put us in contact. We began talking and figured that a service such as this would be of real use to the many other Poles in the UK wanting to buy a home. Most Polish people do not know anything about the buying process or mortgages. Many Poles believe they cannot even get a mortgage here in the UK if they have been here less than three years.”
Since launching kupdom.co.uk last year Barrowman says that the firm has invested up to £100,000 in terms of developing the service, developing the website, marketing, training staff and developing a network of introducers, both in legal firms, independent financial advisors and mortgage lenders.
Barrowman says: “We have in the first year bought around 100 homes for Polish people and we now have around 400 people in the pipeline who have expressed an interest in buying a house. Ultimately it may take a year for many of those to go through the process, because when they initially start looking many Poles may be in relatively low paid temporary employment. They may not even have a bank account set up. Our website can help them get all the information they need to figure out if buying property is the right move for them.”
The Kupdom project comes under the remit of business development manager Karen Dodds, who has used her background in financial advising to establish a network of advisors and lenders who are keen to work with the Polish community. Dodds has also been responsible for the marketing of the Kupdom among the Polish community across Scotland, which has seen her use some tactical advertising as Edinburgh and Glasgow airports and close to churches used regularly by the close knit Polish people.
Barrowman says: “Now that Kupdom has a brand name people are coming to us. Later today I have to call a guy in Birmingham who wants us to handle some work for him as he has around eight Polish clients who want to buy property. Also Scozianet, which is a large Polish web-based newspaper, was in touch last week to see if they could become a media partner. They’d like us to develop a buyers guide for their website, which gets huge numbers of visitors.”
It is the growth in Polish Kupdom visitors who are based in England that has led to Barrowman and the partnership considering a move into England themselves, possibly at the end of the year. “We started to see that around half of the enquiries from the website were coming from England. So, basically we see that there is a real market for us down there with our Kupdom product. We are in the process of setting up an English panel of solicitors who deal with the Polish community and we have some brokers as well, so our first real enquiries are starting now.
“But we see that the future is in us having our own office in England, so need to get our people fully trained up before we make the move south. We have three partners who will be sitting the English transfer exams. England is a much bigger market and what we are offering is not specific to Scotland by any means, so we have to go where the opportunities present themselves. We would more than likely open an English office in the north, possibly the north east.”
The Kupdom team has now expanded to three people, the latest Polish signing being Sebastain Kedziora, who joined the team in November 2007. Kedziora came to the UK to take up a position with a microtech company, however found himself made redundant six months later. As a testament to the work ethic of the Polish people, Kedziora made ends meet by taking up a position at Morisons supermarket, until he saw an advert placed in a Dunblane post office by Caesar & Howie’s Maleszyk looking for help to further develop Kupdom.
As Kedziora explains: “I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to really help my people and I thought someone with my background in mortgage advising in Poland I could bring something useful to Caesar & Howie. I am now responsible for developing Kupdom in England and am spending quite a lot of my time in England meeting people and trying to build the knowledge of Kupdom. We think we are in a good place now as it makes us both very happy to be able to help our countrymen get settled here in the UK.”