Few in construction can boast having helped build their first home before they were a teenager, but for Rose Homes for Life’s new Managing Director Sam Brown, housebuilding truly is in his blood. Our features writer Oliver Sullivan spoke to him about how he built his path to the top.
While Sam Brown doesn’t share a last name with many of his fellow directors in the Rose group of companies, he’s certainly part of the family.
The now Managing Director of Rose Homes for Life first joined the group in 2000 as a young Quantity Surveyor, working his way through the ranks as he combined his analytical brain with his hands-on experience as a labourer.
He took over the reins of the business’ housebuilding arm in October 2025, signalling a new era for the family firm.
But his experience in housebuilding spans far further, having first played his part as a youngster helping his grandad build a new family home.
“In honesty, I didn’t plan to work in construction,” he said. “All my family, my father, my grandad, my uncles, they’re all in construction. I grew up in that construction world – it was all I ever knew, but my family wanted me to go off and do something different.
“I was around building a lot as a child. I worked on sites with my family every summer. In those days you could go on site as a youngster, so you could say I was effectively a plasterer’s labourer from around 12 or 13 years old.
“My grandad owned a building company and when he closed it down he built a house on his yard, which my parents and I moved into.
“So from my young teens you could say I was exposed to housebuilding.”
At a crossroads after finishing his A-levels, Sam debated careers in both design and architecture, although what was supposed to be a short-term job opened the doors to a perfect fit – quantity surveying.
“I’d applied to university to get into architecture,” he said. “I’d received an unconditional offer from the University of Sheffield for September, but earlier in the year I took on a job as a labourer with my dad for a big subcontractor. Within a couple of days the boss had offered me a job in the office.
“Within a few months they recommended I get into quantity surveying and do a day release course in Chelmsford.
“That was 1997, the year Tony Blair brought in the tuition fees – and I thought to myself ‘I can go to university and pay all these fees, or I can go and work for someone and still get a degree that way’.
“I stayed with them for a few years, working on sites in London and Kent, heading out the door at four o’clock in the morning driving my beat-up old Ford Orion and coming back home at six or seven at night.
“That was all while I was doing my studies. I absolutely loved it, but it was killing me.”
It was then Sam contacted a close friend’s father, Tony Auger, for advice on the next steps in his career.
“I’d been offered some roles at some big contractors and at a quantity surveying practice, and went to him to ask for some advice,” he said. “He told me he’d just started working with Steven Rose and said I should come in for a chat.
“From there, Steven offered me more money than anyone else and a company car. It was local work too – I grew up in Brightlingsea so it all worked out well.
“I was very lucky to join when I did. Steven had just taken over from his father and uncle – he was only in his 30s himself. We grew together.
“He helped me finish my degree and become a chartered surveyor and I continued to learn from him and others in the business from there.”
But what would follow wasn’t the traditional path for a quantity surveyor – with his experience as a labourer on new home sites opening the door to an exciting new direction for Rose.
He said: “We were a mains contractor at the time I joined, but we also built a few one-off houses and some small social housing sites. I was the youngest surveyor at the time and ended up working on those projects.
“I was different to most surveyors though in that I had a building background, so I ended up actually project managing a lot of our work. From there I ended up learning a lot more on the technical and regulations sides of things.”
What started as a small development on the site of Rose’s old yard in Mistley soon led to the formation of Rose Homes for Life, the contractor’s housebuilding arm.
“We reinvested the money we made and found some good options for other land,” he said. “So we gradually grew the development side of the business through that.
“From then we went to Rushmere in Ipswich, where we built 10 big houses and then our biggest site at the time in Manningtree, where we built 150.
“It grew from there really.”
Numerous sites followed before his promotion to Managing Director, with Sam now targeting continued growth.
“Things are going really well,” he said. “The last 18 months or so have been very good.
“We’ve got a good land bank and are in a strong position. Sales are quiet for everyone, with everyone waiting for the budget – but we’re comfortable and ready for things to start picking up.
“I want us to continue seeing steady growth. I’m very passionate about maintaining the quality of what we do.
“We know we will never compete with a national housebuilder, so we sell our products as being high-quality homes in the right locations that people want to live in.
“We don’t take a boom or bust approach. We use our own money, we buy sites in great locations with the rule ‘would we live in these homes ourselves?’ – and that’s the same from our two-bed to five-bed properties.
“We’re a real company with real people, compared to the big nationals. Everything about this company is about being good, honest people.
“As the Managing Director, I’m the guardian for Steven and Tom Rose and I want to keep the business safe.”