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Housebuilder Countryside is to close a new modular housing factory as it grapples with losses in its manufacturing business.

The company issued a profit warning at the start of this year and identified its timber frame factory as one of the main culprits for its losses.

The facility in Bardon, Leicestershire, is the newest of three such factories the company owns. Countryside said closing it would result in “a reduction in the run-rate of manufacturing losses”.

Countryside’s chief executive, John Martin, resigned earlier this month. On 13 June the company announced that it would enter a formal sales process. It completed 817 homes in the third quarter of the year, flat on the 818 homes it completed in the same period a year before. Meanwhile its forward order book as of the end of June stood at £1.9bn, up 60% on the same date last year.

Countryside’s decision to close its factory follows the collapse in May of Urban Splash’s modular housing joint venture with Japanese firm Sekisui House and Homes England, which administrators blamed on the under-use of its Alfreton factory.

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