Robert Dean helped to build Savills into one of the largest firm of commercial surveyors in Britain. He was instrumental in putting together the sites that became Canary Wharf and when, in 1992, the managing company went into administration, it was Dean who secured for Savills the key role of advisers to the administrators and aided the recovery and completion of the London Docklands property complex.
As well as chairing Savills Commercial, Dean made a significant contribution to the Investment Property Databank (IPD), which under his chairmanship became a world leader in its specialist field of analysis and property value operating in 28 countries.
Robert Lewis Dean was born in 1940 and educated at Marlborough College and London University, where he gained a BSc in estate management. He joined the small partnership of Alfred Savill, Curtis & Henson in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1961 as a land agent, but his gifts in the commercial and financial field were quickly recognised and he became the youngest partner at the age of 27.
Savills, in the 1970s, specialised in agricultural land management, the purchase and sale of country houses and the top end of London property. While these businesses have flourished, Dean’s strength was in commercial practice where Savills, at the outset of his career, had a negligible involvement. Dean started running the commercial practice in the mid-1970s with a handful of colleagues at a time when firms such as Jones Lang Wootten and Richard Ellis dominated the market.
Such was Dean’s success that by the time he retired in 2005 Savills had become a leading commercial practice with extensive commercial property investment, brokering, fund management, valuation and property management services; Dean made chartered surveyors thoroughly commercial as well as professional.
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He was closely involved in the assembly of the East London site that later became known as Canary Wharf. In the subsequent task of advising the administrators he was more than a match for the difficulties.
In 1985 Savills invested in the fledgeling IPD, whose aim was to produce indices and benchmarking services that would allow the property investment industry to be measured in the same way as stock markets. Dean was chairman of the business from 1987-2005, and helped to define the business model and to introduce new quantitative ideas to the sector. During his term as chairman, IPD grew from a staff of five to 350 and now provides property indices in 27 countries.
Dean was a trustee of William Sutton Housing Trust and chairman of the board of governors of the Wilson Centre, a faculty at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, from 1993 to 2005. He was also a trustee of the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth and an adviser to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Dean was a member of the Royal Thames Yacht Club. He raced as crew boss in three Admiral’s Cups, winning for Britain on Yeoman XX in 1975 and again in 1977. He was on Yeoman XX again in the ill-fated 1979 Fastnet race.
He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and their two sons.
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Robert Dean, chartered surveyor and sailor, was born on February 15, 1940. He died after a short illness on October 21, 2009, aged 69