Richard France is as big as a first-class rugby player should be.

Not that he uses his 6ft 3in frame in quite the same aggressive way as when he was a first division back row rugby union player for Headingley and Nottingham. He is, after all, 55.

But the managing director of Wetherby-based Oakgate Group Plc is still young enough to be sporty – enjoying cycling, tennis, skiing and private flying.

Besides, he still maintains a huge presence physically and in his work in York and North Yorkshire, where some of his projects have generated hundreds of jobs and homes.

A good example of scoring tries, in the developers’ sense, is how Oakgate assembled land ownerships from four farmers, negotiated the acres out of green belt and obtained planning consent to build the 500,000 sq ft Vangarde Business Park in Monks Cross, Huntington.

Or how Oakgate acquired 50 per cent of the company which had a long leasehold interest at Blackfriars House in Rougier Street, York, then acquired the freehold of the 35,000 sq ft office building with car showroom and garage at ground floor. Having gained planning permission to refurbish and change use of the showroom, 60,000 sq ft of offices were created and fully let by completion.

Another of his firm’s triumphs in the city can be seen in the redevelopment of Stonegate Walk into two shops with 14 homes above; the refurbishment and substantial redevelopment of Swinegate Courts; and the revamping of the car park in George Hudson Street to create three ground-floor shops.

And his organisation, of which he is an equal owner with John Grantham, the chief executive, and Paul Caddick, the non-executive chairman, can demonstrate the same creativity in cities all over the north of England and the Midlands.

As a trainee surveyor with a Cambridge firm in 1973, Richard gained his BSC degree in urban estate surveying on a part-time course. He then became an assistant valuer, then valuer to the industrial development department of Derbyshire County Council’s Estates Department.

For two years from 1979 he was estate surveyor and manager for Town Centre Securities Plc in Leeds, before becoming the founding partner of a new commercial estate agency, Hedley France, in York.

In 1983, he became partner of Stansfield Commercial of York, then four years later sold the estate agency to the Prudential Corporation, for which he became York-based director of the Northern region of Prudential Commercial Property Services Ltd.

Then he became an equity partner of Chesterton, later becoming director of Chesterton International Plc, and was-head hunted by Edward Erdman to be managing director.

But in October 1995 he helped to set up Oakgate and has not looked back.

He and his wife, Jill – also a surveyor whom he met at Stansfield Commercial – live at Appleton Roebuck with their three children, Benjamin, 16, Sophie, 14 and Amelia, ten.