Half-year profits at McCarthy & Stone tumbled by two-thirds as it ploughed more cash into a turnaround to cope with a slowdown in the housing market.
The retirement housebuilder handed consultants £4.5m for advice relating to its strategy shake-up, which included closing offices in Scotland and the south-west of England and making almost 200 of its 2,500 staff redundant at a cost of £3.5m.
Those and other one-off costs left McCarthy & Stone with pre-tax profits of £3.6m for the six months to February, down from £10.5m the previous year.
