In 1962, Lewis Greensitt and Lawrie Barratt acquired control of the Company and embarked on a five-year expansion plan. The Company was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1968 as Greensitt & Barratt by which time the growth plan had been "fully achieved". Lewis Greensitt left shortly after the flotation and in 1973 the Company was renamed Barratt Developments. The 1970s saw Barratt making a series of acquisitions, transforming the Company from a local housebuilder to a national firm building around 10,000 houses a year, and rivalling George Wimpey in size. The largest of these acquisitions were the Manchester firm of Arthur Wardle and the Luton-based Janes. Central to Barratt’s expansion was its high-profile marketing, with national advertising, featuring Patrick Allen and a helicopter. Barratt provided starter homes for the first-time buyer and offered part-exchange to those trading up. In the year to June 1983, Barratt sold a record 16,500 houses making it by far the largest housebuilder in the country. In 1983 and 1984 Barratt was hit by two successive ITV World in Action programmes, the first criticising timber-framed housing and the latter, starter homes. Within two years, unit sales had more than halved. Lawrie Barratt led a total restructuring of the Company, abandoning timber framed construction, launching a new product range, and concentrating on the more profitable trade-up market. In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher famously purchased a house on one of Barratt's most upmarket estates, in Dulwich, London. In 1991 the company was badly hit by the recession and recalled Lawrie Barratt from retirement: he retired for good in 1997 and remained life president until his death in December 2012. In 2004 the company sold Barratt American, its US operation, established in the 1980s in California. Following the house price boom in the later 1990s and early 2000s, which saw a number of Barratt’s largest rivals, such as Persimmon, George Wimpey and Taylor Woodrow all acquire rivals to increase in size, Barratt broke its tradition of 30 years and acquired Wilson Bowden, best known for its David Wilson Homes brand, for £2.7 billion in 2007. This brought the David Wilson, Ward Homes and Wilson Bowden Developments brands to the group. In 2008 the company secured a restructuring of its banking covenant package. The non-profit Barratt Residential Asset Management division was established in 2012 to provide property management services on Barratt London developments. David Thomas was appointed chief executive in succession to Mark Clare in 2015. In January 2016 the company has announced plans to open new sites and create over 1,400 new homes across Scotland. A year later it was reported that Barratt Developments had unveiled plans to build even more properties, with the figure rising to approximately 2,500 homes at 14 new sites across Scotland during 2017. As of 2017 Barratt Developments had achieved a 5 star rating in the Home Builders Federation new home customer satisfaction survey for 8 consecutive years.
Barratt used to have a self-created upmarket brand, KingsOak Homes but now uses the David Wilson Homes brand for this purpose.
Commercial construction
Barratt owns and operates Wilson Bowden Developments, which develops commercial property in the UK. Among projects led by Wilson Bowden Developments is Optimus Point, a 74-acre greenfield site at Glenfield.
Marketing
In 2007, the Barratt Homes slogan was changed to ‘Built around you’, emphasising that for the previous fifty years, customer feedback had gone back into the building process to improve house building. The relaunch included a massive TV and newspaper advertising campaign.
Criticisms
In 2017, the Daily Telegraph noted "10 purported crashes in just 48 hours" on what they regard as arguably "Britain’s most dangerous roundabout." Derbyshire County Council removed wrecked vehicles from the roundabout at Mickleover which drivers said was poorly lit and badly signed. The council said that Barratts were responsible for the design though it had been checked by their engineers. In 2020, Barratt found structural design defects within eight multi-storey concrete frame residential towers, including the Citiscape high-rise in Croydon, all built over 10 years previously. Remediation was set to cost £70m.
Brands
Barratt Developments PLC owns three consumer brands: Barratt Homes, David Wilson Homes and Barratt London and one commercial business brand Wilson Bowden.
